American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ Organizations CLA Communist League of America CNVA Committee for Nonviolent Action COFO Council of Federated Organizations CORE Congress of Racial Equality CP Communist Party CPLA Conference for Progressive Labor Action CPM Church Peace Mission CPS Civilian Public Service CRC Christian Reformed Church FERA Federal Emergency Relief Administration FOR Fellowship of Reconciliation IFOR International Fellowship of Reconciliation ILGWU International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union IWW Industrial Workers of the World LID League for Industrial Democracy LIPA League for Independent Political Action MOBE Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam MOWM March on Washington Movement NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NLF National Liberation Front NSBRO National Service Board for Religious Objectors NUL National Unemployed League PMA Progressive Miners of America RCA Reformed Church in America RUMW Reorganized United Mine Workers of America SANE Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy SCM Student Christian Movement SDS Students for a Democratic Society SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SP Socialist Party SPU Student Peace Union TUUL Trade Union Unity League UCL Unemployed Citizens’ League UMWA United Mine Workers of America UTW United Textile Workers WEB Workers’ Education Bureau WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom WPB World Peace Brigade WPC World Peace Council WPUS Workers Party of the United States WRL War Resisters League WTUL Women’s Trade Union League YMCA Young Men’s Christian Association YWCA Young Women’s Christian Association

      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 СКАЧАТЬ