Abraham Went Out
Stipp, John L
A buoyant voyager for justice ABRAHAM WENT OUT A BIOGRAPHY OF A.J. MUSTE Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson Temple University Press, $22.50, 321 pp. John L. Stipp THIS is the first in-depth account of the...
...One is that Muste's life was a failure, glorious perhaps, but a failure nevertheless...
...A sharp and abiding ambivalence regarding goals and the paths to reach them marked his voyaging years...
...When he died some fifteen years ago most Americans were unaware of it, as they were of the doings of his long life (1885-1967...
...Sulpice in Paris, and adds, "To exaggerate the importance of this moment in the life of Abraham Muste is impossible...
...One of the longer chapters of the book is the last one, "The Pacifist and Vietnam: The Final Years...
...In her closing paragraphs Robinson makes sure that the evangelist for peace and justice is perceived as a real live person...
...It was during this period that he slowly drifted into espousal of Com: munist doctrines and strategies, and hence a repudiation of his long-held Christian principles...
...Abraham Went Out allows one of two conclusions to be drawn...
...But growing concern for the plight of the common worker pushed him into radical action unsuited to Quaker mores, in particular his deep and persistent involvement in the much-publicized Lawrence strike of 1919...
...The list could go on, as it does in Robinson's well-researched work...
...As Muste would have it, each reader of this fair-minded account of his love-possessed life will judge which of the evaluations is the more fitting...
...John L. Stipp THIS is the first in-depth account of the life of A.J...
...Muste being Muste, it was a mistake in which he did not long abide...
...Though no one whom Time once featured as the nation's number-one pacifist could be thought of as a nonentity, he comes closer to it than the actual record allows...
...The other focuses on a time adjustment - all great societal metamorphoses, such as Christianity and the Renaissance, require centuries to establish, themselves...
...She describes the re-conversion scene in the church of St...
...But the Great War, as it was then called, prodded him into pacifist attitudes and practices so advanced that he eventually ran out of tolerant congregations...
...to permanent re-dedication to the Christian view that, in his words, "love is the basic reality of the universe...
...The author's central theme is the buoyant voyaging of Abraham Johannes Muste in search of a just and loving society...
...The goals were clear enough - society transmuted into a congregation of the gentle, a community in which every person is naturally concerned for the reasonable well-being of others...
...to new and increasingly dangerous struggles to expand civil rights to all citizens...
...Robinson organizes four chapters on these struggles around the themes "dialogue and persuasion" and "protest and resistance...
...Even today the Muste vision is reflected in developing attitudes and practices - the anti-war stance of youth...
...to doctrinal travail that led him into less orthodox pulpits...
...For a while he found refuge and renewed strength in a Meeting of the Society of Friends...
...The marring is manifest in the experiences of the remaining three decades of his life - in his correspondence with Einstein and Niebuhr and Tillich and Ho Chi Minh and Dorothy Day, with the destitute of the ghettos, with establishment moderates of the fifties, and with the alienated youth of the sixties...
...Since, in his view, Stalin had betrayed the revolution, he turned to Trotskyite Communism...
...After the war he turned to the struggles for civil liberties and the extension of civil rights...
...to ordination as a Dutch Reformed minister...
...and finally, to a passionate and aggressive stand against the bloody Vietnam madness...
...Rather than diminished or even diminishing, the ways of violence and economic injustice seem greater now than in Muste's day...
...Without Muste, he once said, "the American Negro might never have caught the meaning of nonviolence...
...the irreversible obsolescence of Uncle Tom...
...in the thick of most of it...
...is usually thought of as its creative exponent, but he himself knew better...
...Abraham Went Out leads the reader through some six decades of these encounters...
...By 1934 he had come to believe that violent revolution was the only way out of the nation's jungles of economic injustice...
...In the years before World War II, Muste served first as director of the Presbyterian Labor Temple in New York City and then, and throughout the war, as executive secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...In the ever widening circle he drew, he took them all in...
...Professor Robinson's sensitive and disciplined account of this period is one of the outstanding sections of the book...
...to pure pacifism that, for a while, put most of even these pulpits out of reach...
...The next ten years were spent directing the complex program of Brookwood College, a "free school" for working-class adults...
...It is the point toward which all the forces of his formative years had pushed him, and the point from which all the activities of the remaining thirty-one years of his life would emanate...
...One example of his little known touch is the development of industrial unionism, which most persons would probably ascribe to John L. Lewis and the C.I.O...
...Muste's opposition to the war expressed itself in many ways, ranging from trips to both South and North Vietnam, to seemingly endless demonstrations oh the home front...
...Muste...
...to campaigns in support of threatened civil liberties...
...Another example is the nonviolent crusade for racial justice...
...There was plenty of all four, with A.J...
...It was the only major decision of his life that he came later to look back on with shame and regret...
...He died (in his eighty-second year) long before the war ended, with only the hope that later times would bring the bloody catastrophe into a perspective that would serve world peace...
...In the final moment of truth the demands of passion, of the mind, and of the conscience, were reconciled...
...His early years were devoted to conscience-honing, designed to yoke himself and his (often changing) parishes into full social-gospel life...
...His Trotskyite colleague, James Cannon, had been prophetic (if negative) in fearing that 'the terrible background of the church' had marred Muste for life...
...to short-lived apostasy as a Trotskyite Communist...
...Martin Luther King, Jr...
...the entrenched position of union workers...
...As workaday saints go, his sense of humor was on the robust side...
...She portrays him, for example, at Shea stadium cheering for the hapless Mets, as enjoying ballet and opera, and reveling in the antics of the Marx brothers...
...Actually it was pioneered by Muste and for long was simply known as Musteism...
...Even to the more knowledgeable portions of the reading public his name was not exactly a household word...
...The voyaging took him from his native Netherlands to the U.S...
...For that record portrays a life that touched and influenced most of the large movements for change of this century...
...But like the biblical Abraham, as Muste "went out, not knowing whither he went," looking "for a city which existed - and yet had to be brought into existence," he encountered crossroads and detours...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 9
