American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ government enacted statutes to restrict freedom of speech with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Approximately one thousand Americans were convicted of violating these statutes, including the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs. Numerous publications, including FOR’s World Tomorrow, were denied use of the mails. State governments were even more repressive; thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display of the red flag of Communism or the black flag of anarchism, and twenty-three adopted laws defining the crime of ‘‘criminal syndicalism.’’ Private groups, including churches, colluded in stifling dissent. Antiwar clergy faced harassment, were denied civil liberties, and often lost their pulpits. Many of them made their way into the FOR.⁸³

      For those, like Muste, who placed their religious obligations above national loyalty, the attacks on civil liberties and the acquiescence of the churches came as a profound shock. Many of them had assumed that their ‘‘reforming religion was more or less in accord with the enlightened outlook of progressive political leaders such as Woodrow Wilson,’’ and it was distressing to find that their opposition to war and conscription placed them ‘‘outside the terms of citizenship.’’⁸⁴ The mistreatment of conscientious objectors (COs) reflected their newly marginal status. The Selective Service Act of 1917 initially only made provisions for COs who were members of the historic peace churches (i.e., Brethren, Mennonites, and Quakers), giving them a choice between noncombatant military service or confinement under military authority. Most of the four thousand COs who were confined to army camps were antimodern scriptural literalists, but a minority of them were pacifists of the FOR type, including Norman Thomas’s brother Evan, his friend Harold Gray, and the civil libertarian Roger Baldwin. Without clear guidelines, the military’s treatment of COs was inconsistent, ranging from benign neglect to beatings and abuse. At least two COs died during their internment.⁸⁵

      Together, these events radicalized pacifists. Though most of them had long supported social reform, their opposition to World War I was based upon religious belief. Yet the use of government power to suppress their Christian conscience, as well as dissent more broadly, gave meaning to traditional American civil liberties to which they considered themselves heirs. During World War I, FOR member John Haynes Holmes recalled, there ‘‘suddenly came to the fore in our nation’s life the new issue of civil liberties.’’⁸⁶ In October 1917, Holmes, along with Norman Thomas, Hollingsworth Wood, Roger Baldwin, and other pacifists, founded the National Civil Liberties Bureau (later known as the American Civil Liberties Union) to defend the rights of individuals against the state and dissenters against majority opinion. In founding the ACLU, pacifists resisted the obligatory and coercive demands of modern citizenship and ‘‘gave voice to a politics that imagined the citizen first and foremost as an individual and as a bearer of rights.’’ In so doing, pacifists invented a ‘‘rights-based vision of citizenship’’ that has competed with and coexisted alongside the growth of the American national government ever since.⁸⁷

      In their defense of individual rights, pacifists broke from their progressive roots and drew closer to the modernist, revolutionary milieu known as the ‘‘lyrical left.’’ As the above quote by Dewey suggests, the progressive movement had rejected the individualist creed of the nineteenth century, viewing it as the ideological cover for the selfishness, inequality, and class conflict of the industrial capitalist order. Many progressives had almost a blind faith in the federal government as the agent of social progress. But World War I had demonstrated the potentially repressive power of the state, and some progressives (Dewey included) gained an appreciation for civil liberties. Significantly, pacifists and other early members of the ACLU did not believe their support for individual liberty and social democracy was a contradiction in terms. As Doug Rossinow has commented, ‘‘the theoretical conflict between legal individualism and social reconstruction that a later generation of political liberals would assert simply did not obtain in the minds of most political activists on the left half of the political spectrum in these years.’’⁸⁸ Indeed, it was an article of faith for these modern ‘‘liberal-leftists’’ that personal liberation and social emancipation were inseparable. Thus, somewhat unexpectedly, pacifists became allied with cultural experimentalists and revolutionary socialists.⁸⁹

      THE pro-war hysteria arrived gradually to Central Congregational Church and the Boston area. In part, this was due to the fact that Boston had been the center of a vigorous peace movement. Muste was also on very good terms with his parishioners who had generally expressed respect and sympathy for his antiwar stance.⁹⁰ But by Labor Day of 1917, when Muste returned from a two-month summer vacation, the situation had changed dramatically. By this time, the draft was in full effect, as private groups and voluntary associations mobilized to do the coercive work of a national government that lacked a modern administrative apparatus, a situation that fostered a mob psychology. At Central Congregational Church, some seventy parishioners had sons in the service and many others supported the war effort through the YMCA, YWCA, or the Red Cross. The church itself was militarized, actively fund-raising for a War Camp Community Recreation Fund and listing an ‘‘honor roll of men in the military and naval service’’ on the back of Sunday service programs.⁹¹ Some began to question Muste’s ability to provide adequate consolation should their sons be killed. As a result, pressure mounted on him to moderate his pacifism. Church officers proposed that he take a leave of absence for the duration of the war. Even his pacifist comrades Willard Sperry and Edgar Parke urged him to modify his pacifism publicly, as they had done, arguing that maintaining the connection between a minister and church superseded the call of prophetic witness.⁹²

      Muste, however, stood his ground. On December 9, 1917, he affirmed his pacifist faith in a letter of resignation he read to the congregation in lieu of a sermon. Instead of being treasonous, his pacifism showed the utmost concern for ‘‘the boys in the service’’ and, most important, authentically reflected the spirit of Jesus and the early Christian church. Rather than support the war effort, which was the work of fallible men, the church should focus on creating ‘‘the spiritual conditions that should stop the war and render all wars unthinkable.’’ He went on to explain that another recent ‘‘mystical experience of God’’ had released him from any doubt; he was ‘‘happy and at rest in God. The war no longer has me by the throat.’’ In concluding, he offered his resignation ‘‘without the least feeling of bitterness,’’ unless the church was willing to respect their differences. Two weeks later, at a meeting that filled the chapel, church officers affirmed their ‘‘honor, respect and love’’ for Muste, while also passing a resolution supporting the American war effort. They offered him three months leave ‘‘to investigate the war situation,’’ presumably with the hope that he would change his mind. Muste accepted the leave, but ultimately tendered his resignation.⁹³

      Muste stayed long enough to deliver the Christmas Day sermon. A meditation on 1 John 3:2 (‘‘Now are we the children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be’’), it reveals the powerful ways in which his radical Christian pacifism both intersected with and challenged the modernist project. The sermon began with French philosopher Henri Bergson’s comments on his 1913 visit to the United States to the effect that there was a gap between technological and industrial achievement, on the one hand, and moral and spiritual development, on the other. Nowhere was this more apparent than in modern warfare, which had multiplied humanity’s capacity to kill without a corresponding change in views of war and peace. ‘‘Our supreme immediate need,’’ Muste paraphrased Bergson, ‘‘is finer, nobler men and women, clearer minds, above all, loftier souls.’’ Modernist social scientists used the term ‘‘cultural lag’’ to describe this idea, and they believed their research would supply the information and knowledge needed to bridge the gap between science and culture. Muste, by contrast, contended that Christianity had already provided ‘‘the answer’’ with its message that ‘‘the divine can and does express itself through the human,’’ and he promised that awareness of the divinity within oneself and within others would reveal that social conventions, churches, and nations were just illusions separating people from each other.⁹⁴ In Muste’s formulation, the path out of the alienation and anxiety of modern times was not the imagined community СКАЧАТЬ