American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ to fire Muste was in part due to his ‘‘erratic’’ behavior over the course of 1916 and 1917, as he alternated between expressions of pacifism and support for the war. She points to an article Muste published in the Congregationalist in late 1916 in which he called on readers to ‘‘do your bit for Belgium’’ and a patriotic service he led after the war was declared that included a paean to the ‘‘noble American ideals’’ of freedom, opportunity, and Christianity.⁹⁵ Another possible interpretation of this period, however, is that Muste did not initially understand his pacifism as contrary to ‘‘Americanism.’’ Government repression, the link made between patriotism and war, was as ‘‘unanticipated and shocking’’ for him as it was for other pacifists and dissenters. As Muste recalled in his memoirs, before the United States entered World War I, the loyalty of its inhabitants, including members of the Socialist Party, was taken for granted; ‘‘there were no F.B.I.’s or state loyalty boards to assemble dossiers on thousands of citizens,’’ he commented, adding that these trends have since ‘‘endured and gained in strength.’’⁹⁶ Certainly the work of Nick Salvatore and others bears out Muste’s perception that citizenship and socialism were not viewed as mutually exclusive until World War I and the subsequent Red Scare.⁹⁷ Reflecting these concerns, immediately after leaving Central Congregational Church, Muste became a volunteer for the nascent ACLU, serving as an advocate for COs and other persecuted pacifists in the New England area.

      In staying true to his pacifism, Muste consciously chose the life of a prophet and the fellowship of dissenters over that of a minister and the obligations of modern citizenship. His memoirs provide some clues as to why he felt compelled to follow his conscience over the demands of his beloved congregation while others, such as Sperry and Parke, did not. In recalling these years, Muste reflected that, growing up in the Reformed Church, he had ‘‘received too solid a dose of Calvinism not to have a strong conviction about human frailty and corruption.’’ Thus, once he had concluded that Christianity and war were irreconcilable, he was congenitally unable to ‘‘adapt the Gospel to [external] circumstances’’ that violated his deepest sense of what was the true meaning of Christianity. Yet he had not become a new sort of fundamentalist, as William Adams Brown’s trenchant criticism of pacifism would suggest. The mystical creed he embraced saw religious vitality as growing out of a creative tension between engagement and adaptation to a changing environment, on the one hand, and those ‘‘permanent and time-transcending Realities’’ that emerged from direct communion with God, on the other. Moreover, like his spiritual mentor, Rufus Jones, Muste was fully cognizant of the psychological and cultural factors that might mediate between his experiences of the divine, and he conceded that, for some, mysticism might be a sign of pathological disturbance.⁹⁸ However we choose to interpret it, his religious experiences clearly offered him a language for breaking with the ministry, the conventions of middle-class life, and the demands of national belonging in the modern era.

      UPON leaving Central Congregational Church, Muste continued his work with the ACLU of providing advocacy and legal help for pacifists throughout New England. In this context, he joined the Religious Society of Friends, a decision that apparently involved no theological crisis. Since his break from the Reformed Church, he had subscribed to the Quaker doctrine of the inner light, which holds that every person has access to God’s presence, a sentiment reinforced by his participation in his Boston-area discussion club and membership in the FOR. The Quakers’ history of nonresistance and social activism also reflected his own evolving beliefs. Becoming a member of the Society of Friends did not, moreover, exclude other religious affiliations. Indeed, for the rest of his long life (except for his years as Marxist-Leninist), he would remain a member of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, an identity and commitment that speaks to his ongoing engagement with the Calvinist tradition.⁹⁹

      In January 1918, the Providence Friends’ Meeting offered him a small salary and a home in return for teaching and ministerial services and maintenance of a reading room in the meetinghouse, a center for ‘‘the various unorthodox, persecuted individuals in the city’’ to gather and ‘‘metaphorically hold hands.’’ Though Providence’s Quaker community was affluent and well established, the authorities viewed the meetinghouse as a source of irritation and concern. Reflecting his newly disreputable status, on June 7, 1918, at the annual meeting of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, Muste narrowly escaped arrest when a local Baptist minister charged him with seditious speech.¹⁰⁰

      As this experience suggests, the persecution of dissenters intensified even as the war wound to a close. By the late summer of 1918, so-called ‘‘slacker raids’’ reached a fevered pitch, as patriot volunteers rounded up men suspected of dodging the draft. By the end of the war in November 1918, the country was in the midst of a full-fledged Red Scare, culminating in the ‘‘Palmer raids’’ of 1920 in which Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up hundreds of political radicals in the labor movement and deported some five hundred of them.

      Yet it would be misleading to emphasize only the repressive atmosphere of the immediate postwar years; for the left, 1918–20 was also a time of expectancy, urgency, and optimism. In Russia, the Red Army defeated counterrevolutionaries and brought their revolution into eastern Europe, while in western Europe trade unions broke free of their exclusivist traditions and became mass movements for democratic control of industry. Meanwhile, in the colonized world, uprisings suggested that the era of imperialism was nearing an end. Even in the United States, where American capital emerged from the war stronger than ever, many believed that capitalism was in its ‘‘death throes’’ and that they were part of an international movement giving birth to a more egalitarian social order. With Soviet Russia as their beacon, they looked to the labor movement to make their dreams of revolution a reality. The eruption of a massive strike wave involving some four million workers throughout the country suggested that labor was indeed realizing its historic role. There were general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg, strikes among longshoremen, stockyard workers, carpenters, textile and clothing workers, telephone operators, and, most dramatically, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, involving 365,000 steel workers. Proposals for reconstructing the social order came from across the liberal-left political spectrum. Even the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) entertained proposals to extend wartime economic controls, establish social insurance, and nationalize the railways.¹⁰¹

      Muste was deeply affected by the era’s revolutionary spirit, as well as by ‘‘the visions of the prophets of a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness would prevail and every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none should be afraid.’’ Convinced that ‘‘a new world’’ was ‘‘about to be born,’’ he joined other members of the Boston FOR in founding ‘‘the Comradeship,’’ a group committed to examining ‘‘the question of how to organize our lives so that they would truly express the teachings and spirit of Jesus.’’¹⁰² In November, he moved his family from Providence to the Comradeship’s headquarters in a rented house in the working-class neighborhood adjacent to Back Bay. They lived on the second floor, while pacifist minister Harold Rotzel, his wife, and three-year-old daughter lived on the third. Other members of the Comradeship included Cedric Long, another minister who had lost his pulpit because of his opposition to the war, and three women of independent means: Anna N. Davis, a Quaker and member of the Hallowell family; Ethel Paine, a prominent Bostonian and descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; and Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a socialist and a disciple of William James who believed with the philosopher in the reality and ‘‘genius of the trance phenomena.’’ To these women, Muste, Long, and Rotzel were ‘‘saintly’’ characters, and they served as essential sources of support for the Comradeship and for Muste throughout his life.¹⁰³

      The headquarters of the Comradeship served as a sort of alternative community for its members and for a hodgepodge of radicals who used it as a meeting space and safe haven. The spiritual atmosphere was intense. Muste and Rotzel arose every morning at five o’clock, bundled themselves in overcoats, and ‘‘read the New Testament—especially the Sermon on the Mount—together, analyzed the passages, meditated on each phrase, СКАЧАТЬ