American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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      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.

      CHAPTER 1

      Calvinism, Class, and the Making of a Modern Radical

      Character is built by action rather than by thought. Contemplation does not beget virtues. But out of the elements of the daily struggle we mold at last conceptions of justice, parity and truth and build that temple of morality which is the chosen seat of true religion. Finally, it is only through the conflict into which his unrest urges him that man at last finds God. Revelation is powerless if it enlightens only the reason. . . . And faith is valid only when it leads to action, so its ultimate satisfaction is found only in the active life.

      —A. J. Muste, 1905

      MUSTE WAS BORN in January 1885 in Zierikzee, a port town in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. Zierikzee, Muste learned later in life, was apparently the Dutch ‘‘equivalent of our Podunk,’’ small, poor, and remote.¹ Indeed, from the nineteenth century to the present, Zierikzee and Zeeland as a whole have had a reputation for economic backwardness and religious orthodoxy. A series of islands located on the extreme southwestern coastal zone of the Netherlands, much of Zeeland actually lies below sea level and is protected by a system of river and sea dikes. This location gave rise to a paradoxical character. On the one hand, as its reputation as the boondocks of the Netherlands suggests, Zeeland was isolated from the mainland. On the other hand, because it was located in the estuaries of some of Europe’s greatest rivers, it was a commercially and strategically important area to control.²

      This paradox of isolation and interconnectedness provides the backdrop for Muste’s experiences in the Netherlands, the reasons for his migration to the United States in 1891, and perhaps even a key to his adult character and politics. A close analysis of his childhood and youth reveals that the Dutch American community was less insulated and conservative than Muste characterized it or than historians of Dutch ethnicity have recognized. Despite their best efforts to isolate themselves, the small world of Dutch American Calvinists intersected with larger processes of global capitalism, industrialization and class formation, international migration patterns, urbanization, and cultural changes related to religion and gender. It is in these intersections that it becomes possible to understand the making of a modern radical.

      THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century, Zeeland’s economy was like its geography, both remote from and integrated into the world market. As the СКАЧАТЬ