THE CHRISTER

...In January, 1919 (his second child was born that year), normalcy hit the factories in Lawrence, Mass...

...But "no other designation than God really fits a force working for righteousness and brotherhood which demands complete devotion of men and which is invincible . . ." Thus, he went on, Marxism without God is an illusion...

...They stuck to their guns— and I mean guns...

...That infinitely gentle man never got the hang of hating and never really fooled anyone but himself...

...III At 66 A. J. Muste can ride steerage, which isn't torture in itself, without undergoing the torture of envy when he sees the first-class passengers...

...Insofar as choice is given men, A. J. Muste, with all his abilities, could have chosen differently, or, simply by refraining from choice, could have been a first-class passenger himself, riding on other men's backs instead of carrying them on his own...

...He had started out in life as a preacher...

...Then Cara Cook, his assistant, got a "Landed yesterday" postcard from New York, and, a few days later, a single-spaced typewritten letter of 16 pages...

...All I can remember about A. J. Muste after 20 years," the union stiff said, "is the time I went to the big Paterson strike meeting in the winter of 1931...

...But he tended to adapt himself to the masses more than a real political leader can afford to do...

...What did the labor movement, with higher wages and shorter hours, want with education, much less with a movement to organize the unorganized...

...Two years earlier, in 1934, A. J. Muste had been one of the heroes of the great teamsters' victory there, and the union leaders had taken him by force to a clothing store and put a brand new suit on him...

...that was carrying a bad thing too far...

...the initiates said, "Consider the lilies of the field...

...But A. J. Muste had never left the church, and that was the complaint, down the years, of all his labor associates who found him, as Cannon put it, "the last chance and the best chance," but hopelessly incapable of crawling on his belly in the mud...

...He wasn't preaching or confessing...

...The voice of A. J. Muste, the voice of a man who is saying what he believes, and always what he believes, and only what he believes, grows louder as the end (of us...

...The true revolution would divide the gold as a matter of course, but the false revolution would simply transfer the gold and leave all mankind still crucified...

...Not a few, their nerves worn with the suspense of waiting for the blow, express the hope that it may fall tomorrow, rather than the next day...

...A. J. Muste was a true pacifist...

...Now he could no longer swallow Calvinist orthodoxy, and he was going to quit, when he was called to the Congregational Church in Newton, Mass...

...I was getting the idea of Quakerism, and of A. J. Muste...

...A. J. joined the Providence, R. I., Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends...

...It provides the one measure by which the capitalistic system stands condemned...

...you will never find him rising with the Budenzes and the Chamberses to tell all (or more than all...

...Too much of a gentleman," said Jim Cannon, disgusted at A. J.' s treatment of the "reactionaries" in the Trotskyite movement...

...sending the Collector of Internal Revenue a copy of the Scriptures instead of a tax return...

...I have become convinced that it would not...

...A. J. Muste was a good administrator and a good mass worker, but he could not crawl on his belly in the mud...

...The American worker," Trotskyite Cannon said (and Quaker Muste heard) in 1934, "is no Quaker...

...They hung the bunting on the Cross and went to Armageddon (1917 edition...

...Ten years later—in 1950—A...

...A. J. Muste was, like the Trotskyites, and unlike the Stalinists, the Socialists, and the New Dealers, a true revolutionary...

...I turned to the fellow next to me and asked him who it was...

...He had been moved to testify...

...it ends in its members' lying and cheating in dealing with one another...

...He was saying something to himself, and his voice had picked it up and amplified it...

...A few days later, in Minneapolis, Vincent Dunne, the Trotskyite teamsters' union leader, got a letter from a friend...

...it doesn't change much...

...he was no more motivated by economic interest than was Karl Marx, who said that all men were so motivated and himself starved in a London slum rather than "make a machine of myself" by grubbing for money...

...In the Dutch Reformed Church, they read Scripture uncritically...

...The Cross of Christ wasn't crowded...

...He served as volunteer parson at the Friends' Moses Brown School, which gave his family a place to live...

...Some of them are fools for Christ, but all of them are fools for A. J. Muste...

...War is only an outward occasion for true pacifism...

...in the Union Theological Seminary, they read it critically...

...Everywhere men wait, most of them, it seems, in a spirit of fatalistic resignation, for the signal to arms to be given...

...they both wanted the money, and the bosses happened to have it...

...there had to be a revolution...

...The Lawrence strike was his first, and then, in the next decade or so came Passaic, Paterson, New Bedford, Toledo, Minneapolis, Columbus, Allentown, Gillespie, Charleston, and some more...

...Mayer's articles have appeared in more than a score of American publications, including Negro Digest, International Digest, Reader's Digest, Catholic Digest, Magazine Digest, Life, Harper's, The Saturday Evening Post, Better Homes 6 Gardens, and Fellowship...

...A. J. Muste was no hero, though he was mistaken for one...

...In Marion, N.C., where they lost, Tom Tippett asked every parson in town to preach the funeral sermon for the six strikers who had been shot—all six of them in the back—by the company's private deputies...

...If they had lived, if the revolution hadn't devoured the revolutionaries, the workers' democracy would have come, of course...

...A. J. had to take time off the picket line to preach the funeral sermon, because the local parsons wouldn't...

...celebrated May Day (as the AFL used to do), taught the class struggle...

...VI Nobody knows better than A. J. Muste that if he cannot love Stalin he cannot love at all...

...Would a genuine Marxist-Leninist movement be a dependable agency for the prevention of war...

...War, which made Hitler Hitler, and made Hitler worse, and made the next Hitler worse than the last one—war was one thing...

...By 1929, he was committed, however nebulously: He told the Brookwood graduating class that "Brookwood stands on the basis of the class struggle...

...One of his reasons is irresistible: pacifism must make its witness everywhere and always against violence, war, and tyranny and always make this one witness if it makes no other...

...The first of his three children was a year old...

...The Christian church failed again in 1941, and again in 1951...

...and this it cannot do in collaboration with Stalinists if for no other reason than that the Stalinists won't let it...

...He said: 'It's Muste.' " 'Who's Muste?' I said...

...The Christian church, on the other hand, must believe in miracles or admit that it is not Christian...

...It would not preach, much less practice, Christ crucified...

...Wo r k e r s would learn the interest of the workers, just as capitalists learned the interest of capitalists...

...It becomes for capitalist leaders an excuse for maintaining powerful armaments, supporting Fascist dictators, resorting to war...

...but anything was better than having to be a Christian and love your enemies...

...a school which does not accept the capitalist system...

...He had seen four-year-olds spitting blood in the Carolina mills...

...A. }. Muste could talk better than the rest of us...

...Out of the welter of it all, the Trotskyites went on with the "permanent revolution," and, when the second war came, their leaders went into one of Roosevelt's New Deal prisons...

...The letter goes on: " . . . The labor movement has often been proclaimed as the dependable agency to prevent war . . . The claim has not been substantiated...

...J.' s 65th birthday was to be celebrated with a series of dinners across the land...

...The Christian church failed in 1917...

...Only a miracle will save any of them—and us—now (and we know it...

...Muste has gone back to the church...

...Some 4,500 of those ministers wish that he would speak a little less loudly as it is, and they shudder a little when he comes to town...

...He preached the revolution the way so many true pacifists of his time preached it, as if nobody would be hurt, or as if marshmallows would be used for bullets...

...All that A. J. Muste has to do is to convert the Jim Crow, capitalist, warmaking Christian church to Christ crucified, and his work is done...

...But the labor movement and all the other movements, except the Christian church, are forbidden to believe in miracles...

...But despite the handicap of this background, he gave promise because of his exceptional personal qualities, and because of the great influence he had over the people associated with him...

...If there is a conflict between pacifism and the picket line—where the picket line means the class war— it is a conflict that comes only to activists, never to talkavists...

...Young men come to him, as they come to the Quakers, and as the Quakers come to him, to work for him and with him...

...Stalin was to blame...

...A man stood up, a long stringy man about six feet high that you'd say had been disjointed and reassembled...

...With this organizational preoccupation— remember, that was what the Trotskyites complained that he didn't have—A...

...and the Communist International...

...And so he returned, "to confront the church itself and its members with the fearful character of the crisis confronting the race and with the demand that they, above all others, square their deeds with their professions, take up their responsibility, gird themselves for the sacrifice necessary to put an end to war and exploitation, and to make the spirit that was in Jesus dominant upon earth...

...But I wasn't going to let anybody get away with loving Hitler while I was around...

...A Trotskyite," said Cannon on another occasion, "will do anything for the party, even if he has to crawl on his belly in the mud...

...namely, that the dynamic we require for life of the individual and society is spiritual, Christian, and the method is, basically and essentially, that of non-violence...

...In his Marxian innocence he mistook instinct for both learning and interest...

...Sometimes they won, and sometimes they lost...

...The instinct of the workers was identical with that of the bosses...

...By the time he became the first director of Brookwood Labor School, in Katonah, N.Y., in 1921, he was ready to let pacifism slide for the class war...

...At each of the dinners a union stiff spoke, along with a pacifist, a preacher, a professor, and a politician, each of them telling how A. J. had done more for unionism (or pacifism, or preaching, or professing, or politics) than he had for pacifism, preaching, professing, or politics...

...He saw the workers with a capital W, as a separate species...

...that was all that was wrong with Marx...

...got through with you, to more than you could afford...

...Poor Stalin...

...and A. J. Muste left it to work where Christ was crucified in factory, mine, and mill...

...Thus, added experience, observation of the crisis in which mankind finds itself, and arguments which seem to me irrefutable, have brought me again to the position which I held some years ago...

...James P. Cannon History of American Trotskyism • * * IT was a Sunday morning, in the the summer of 1940, on the shore of one of the finger lakes in upper New York, and silent worship was going on...

...What's he do?' " 'Used to be a preacher,' said the fellow next to me, 'before he went straight.' " II At the age of six, Abram Jakob Muste went straight from Ellis Island, with his Dutch immigrant mother and father and brothers and sisters, to Grand Rapids, and straight from there to Hope College nearby, and straight from there, with a year's detour into Iowa, to teach within 25 miles of Anna Huizenga and marry her, to the Dutch Reformed seminary in New Jersey and into a little New York City pulpit...

...Vice-President Matty Woll, who wore a wing collar at lunch, got after Brookwood as a Red Menace...

...The CPLA became the American Workers Party and then merged, originally over A. J.'s protest, in the end with his acceptance, with the Trotskyites...

...What had become of Christ crucified...

...but he does not yet see how pacifism, whose spokesman he is, can work with the Stalinists...

...I would take this faker on, whoever he was, as soon as worship was out and it was legal to fight...

...The true pacifist is pacific in his heart, and therefore in his relations in his home, in his work, and among his associates...

...His letters from Honefuss, immediately after his meeting with the Old Man, were, even for an enthusiast like A. J., hysterical: "I am completely captivated by him...

...His voice, maybe...

...To preach (and to live) Christ crucified means (and it still means, and always will) to be a social revolutionary...

...In Quaker worship, you testify, if you are moved to, but you don't answer back...

...A. J. Muste was a premature anti-Stalinist, singing, at Brookwood, as Trotsky sang in Norway, of what should have been, could have been, would have been— but never in all history was...

...and even he, the best prospect of all, couldn't come through in the end because of that terrible background of the church...

...A. J. organized the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, in the first instance to save Brookwood, ultimately to work "toward a revolutionary American labor movement...

...In 1935 the Trotskyites took the "French turn" ordered by Tro.tsky to infiltrate and control the Socialist parties, which had failed to withstand the rise of fascism in Europe...

...And so did the labor movement and all the other movements...

...The AFL disowned Brookwood...

...Everywhere armaments are being piled up at a feverish rate...

...his prestige and his reputation...

...the soles were gone and he had newspapers in them...

...By 1932 he had seen worse things than four-year-olds spitting blood...

...His folks were poor, had always been poor, but they didn't think they were poor and had never been hungry...

...He had helped organize the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international association of Christian pacifists, and he represented the American Civil Liberties Union, which succeeded, at long last, in getting it through the head of Wood-row Wilson that whipping conscientious objectors in prison was a dispensable part of the War Effort...

...At 66 A. J. Muste can make a $100 or $500 speech for $10 or $25, which is just enough, or not quite enough, for vittles, without envying the speakers who make a $10 or $25 speech for $100 or $500...

...I was pretty well convinced that the Marxist-Leninist position was sound...

...Why, by adapting himself to the masses more than a real political leader can afford to do...

...if you had backed down in Newton, I wouldn't have gone on believing in God...

...In the summer of 1935 a troubled revolutionary—troubled by the discovery that oppression no more converted the oppressed than it did the oppressor—went to see the Old Man, in exile in Norway...

...Three pacifists named Muste, Rotzell, and Long showed up at strike headquarters, and Muste was elected chairman of the strike committee and organizer (and later general secretary) of the independent Amalgamated Textile Workers...

...Again over A. J.'s protest, the Trotskyites split the Socialist Party, absorbed the left wing, and left the right wing fluttering around (which it still does) in the New Deal air...

...So far from combatting the idea, which has become increasingly prevalent since the war, that violence is 'the only way out,' it accepts and encourages that idea...

...But when the first boy from the church was killed in France, Christ crucified was inadequate consolation to the Christian parents, and A. J. resigned...

...As old men give him money—and wish (or think they wish) that they were young again—so young men, in and out of the ministry, and across the country, gravitate to him in their search for the good, the true, and the beautiful, and stay there...

...A. J. Muste had never left the church because he had no more stopped being a pacifist than he had ever started being one...

...not of him) approaches...

...Some seventeenth sense told me that he was out of my class...

...but he tried to love Stalin, in the labor movement, and he found out how hard it is...

...And in the smallest town, a preacher who is preaching Christ crucified—and the social revolution that goes with it—is an FOR member...

...In 1933 the AFL directors of the collapsing school threw A. J. (and most of the staff and students) out...

...Now Dunne read the letter, whistled, and turned to his sidekick, Bill Brown, and said: "Bill, what do you think...

...Thus the end of the CPLA and the American Workers Party—the "Musteites" of left-wing-splinter-party history...

...He could not believe one way and walk another and act still another...

...Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander...

...The task of making permanent the "temporary" terror— the "war Communism"—in which the Russian revolution was born had been lifted from Marx's shoulders by history, from Lenin's by death, and from Trotsky's by exile...

...He will never be a professional anti-Communist...

...Who—as the Lord demanded of Job—feeds the young ravens...

...Every day the relations between the great powers grow more tense...

...Brookwood hung up Gompers' picture next to Lenin's (or v.v...

...If I can't love Hitler," he said, "I can't love at all...

...at once soft and precise...

...A. J. said thanks just the same, he was happy where he was, preaching Christ crucified...

...Now it's against the Quaker ground rules—this was Quaker worship)—to answer back...

...The trade unions were no more eager to learn than the trade associations...

...His eyes, maybe...

...Little churches don't get big preachers often, and Newton didn't want to lose A. J. So they suggested a leave of absence with some nice Christian war agency like the "Y" or the chaplain corps...

...It took a few more years for Brookwood to collapse completely...

...But more than that, more than his hands, even, hands like Durer's, hands that you thought of shaping clay, or dust...

...Then, a few moments later: "Say, Vince, we ought to get that suit back...

...I never did somehow...

...He could not believe in peace, and maybe even talk peace, and not be a pacifist...

...He was there, all right...

...The labor and revolutionary movements accept lying and cheating in dealing with the "class enemy," who lies and cheats...

...They had organized unemployed "leagues" (which collapsed when employment came) and, as Trotskyite collaborators (the Trotskyites regarded them as stooges), helped conduct the great automobile and truckers' strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis in the early New Deal...

...Trotsky, a little more cautiously, returned the compliment...

...I was in the first row of the audience, and right up above me, on the platform, was this long skinny fellow...

...The AFL's United Textile Workers' Union was in favor of accepting the boon of reduced working hours—for piece-workers...

...To take the Christian position does not mean to justify or condone the capitalistic system...

...He was a good mass worker, gaining the confidence of the workers very quickly...

...The AFL first supported Brookwood, timidly, but the students came, as always from the advanced unions, primarily the needle trades and the miners...

...Nor is there any ground for looking to the U.S.S.R...

...It's not true, it's not true, it can't be true," she kept saying as she read it...

...His friends saw him—the class warrior—for the last time as the boat pulled out from Hoboken pier with his skinny arm raised in the clench-ed-fist salute of bloody revolution...

...The Mustes had never had a vacation, and the inevitable collection, taken by their friends among their friends, overflowed with contributions from people who hated Musteism and loved Muste...

...A. J. Muste went back to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which he is now executive secretary and the most revolutionary member—leading the picket line in front of the White House and the Soviet Embassy and a Jim Crow restaurant or hotel...

...He saw Workers' Education, also with initial capitals, as a separate species of education...

...clear gray eyes that peered through old-fashioned silver-rimmed specs, peering through and beyond you...

...Soviet and Communist leaders insist that Roosevelt, Baldwin, and all other political leaders should be judged by their actual policies, by the armaments they build, rather than by lipservice to peace in their speeches...

...He was, you might say, the last chance and the best chance...

...It was hard enough to be a Jew, even in America, and desperately hard in Germany...

...he had the seasoned skin of country men...

...twenty years later he met a parishioner from those days who said, "You saved my soul...

...He had never left the church, as his students at Brookwood knew when they heard him say, again and again and again, in the course of their Workers' Education, "On the one hand . . . but on the other . . ." He had never left the church to become a materialist—the first requirement of Marxism—because he was no more materialist in his heart and in his life than was Karl Marx, who created the fatal fantasy of materialism...

...We got a lot of publicity from his activity, but nothing tangible in the way of organization...

...The working staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation is composed, I think without exception, of young and middle-aged men of extraordinary calibre...

...An offering, or collection, MILTON MAYER, a friend of A. J. Muste and a student of his work for more than a decade, wrote this estimate of the great pacifist while en route to Europe on a 28-day freighter crossing of the Atlantic...

...Brown said: 'Well, I'll be damned...

...It took him the best part of 20 years to discover that the labor movement (and the revolutionary movement, which captured a handful of laborers when times were "bad" and lost them when times were "good") would not be anything but a capital movement until it practiced what the church did not, namely, Christ crucified...

...J. Muste may not argue the case for peace quite so well as Christ argued it...

...He made the same mistake Marx made: he really believed in Marxism...

...His articles during the next six months or more will come from Europe, where he will be lecturing, studying, and writing, with headquarters at Frankfurt...

...The letter that Cara Cook got exactly 15 years ago began: "War is the central problem for us all today . . And war appears to be imminent...

...And men of the highest standing and intelligence, like people in a panic at a fire, buy pieces of land in remote interior regions and tell you that there a handful of like-minded people will begin to rebuild civilization after the holocaust . . ." That was exactly 15 years ago...

...with God, it is no longer Marxism...

...The miracle of the social revolution—Thy Kingdom come on earth—will work through those who believe in miracles or it won't work at all...

...would be taken, and it always amounted, by the time A.J...

...But socialism, pursuing gold for the many, like capitalism, pursuing gold for the few, crucified its beneficiaries on the cross of gold...

...A. J. was the oldest son—"If you weren't an idiot, that meant the ministry"—and in college, besides romping through Bible and the classics and working in the library and dining hall, he was captain of the state championship basketball team, state oratorical champion, and valedictorian...

...I was down and out, on strike, and my shoes were so thin I could feel the cold through the soles...

...his father was a good coachman in Holland and a good furniture worker in New Holland...

...All his other reasons are integrated with the problem of influence and effectiveness, with the danger of "the confusion of pacifism and Communism in people's minds...

...The American Marxist revolutionary—who had once been a world Christian revolutionary—had met the world Marxist revolutionary...

...Then the AFL got scared...

...It will be said that the official Communist movement has departed from Marxism-Leninism, a contention with which I happen to be in agreement...

...Marxism,- claiming its victory to be "inevitable," still demands 'that its adherents sacrifice everything, including life, for a world they may never see...

...It is lying and cheating and what they lead to—violence—that leads to the slaughter of the workers in war and the replacement of capitalism with Fascism...

...That was 1914, and he had already voted, in 1912, for Debs...

...but the revolution always devoured the revolutionaries...

...He was Most Likely to Succeed...

...He was there, in the mines, in the mills, in the factories, crucified by the bosses in caves, at looms, on assembly lines...

...I thanked God (a la Swinburne) that I was not a Christian and didn't have to pretend, much less try, to be one...

...He seems to have had the confidence—it's called security now—that makes the difference between a mere rebel and a real revolutionary...

...He had a big sloping forehead wrinkled like the back of his pants knees, a big nose, big ears set at 45 degrees, a nice wide mouth, and a nice mop of brown and gray hair...

...The Trotskyites' God was really an old man with a beard, to be seen face to face by the faithful, and ever ready with new Revelation...

...Then he sat down...

...What told me he was out of my class was the way he said those ten words, "If I can't love Hitler, I can't love at all...

...Those eyes of his peered through those silver-rimmed specs at you, and through you like nitroglycerin through a bank vault...

...Quite the contrary...

...but when it came time to lay it down and choose between the Cross and the bunting, the critical and the uncritical were one with the Congregationalists— and the Baptists and the Methodists and the Presbyterians and the Unitarians—of Newton, Mass...

...contributions dried up...

...All the do-gooders were on the platform to pep us up and raise the relief fund...

...still less with Marxism-Leninism...

...writing a hundred letters a day or reading a thousand, and turning out eloquent little books and pamphlets and articles, arguing the case for labor better than the unions argue it, the case for racial equality better then the social workers argue it, the day's news better, sharper, clearer, deeper than the newscasters argue it, and always arguing peace not quite so well as Christ argued it . . . not quite...

...He was going straight out of the ministry, as a result of taking some "higher criticism" courses at Union Theological Seminary...

...I never saw such long legs on a man, and he kept crossing them to get them out of the way, but pretty soon they'd start swinging, and I saw the bottom of each of his shoes...

...it came from the very center of the man...

...As errand boy in the high school library in Grand Rapids, he had got into the forbidden shelf of evolution books...

...In 1915 and 1916 America was moving to war and preaching peace (as in 1941 and in 1951), and the passengers, in and out of the Christian ministry, were hanging on heroically to the crowded Ship of State...

...Muste's handicap was his background...

...Remember, he speaks now for some 5,000 Christian ministers (besides some 10,000 laymen) in the FOR...

...They both knew, by instinct, all that they needed to know to pursue, in collision with one another, their common objective...

...fasting all of Holy Week, at the age of 66, in penance for his country's new H-bomb...

...IV Jim Cannon, the Trotskyite who found that A. J., "the last chance and the best chance," could not overcome "that terrible background of the church," wrote of him: "Muste went out there"—t h e Chevrolet strike in Toledo in '35—"and exerted a considerable influence on the rank and file leaders of the strike...

...Loving Hitler was another...

...but he couldn't stop there...

...Further developments of the class struggle will bring plenty of fighting in the U.S.A...

...In the dead of winter, 30,000 workers walked out, and the AFL sorrowfully turned away...

...But neither could he believe in social reform, and talk social reform, and not get out on the picket line...

...You couldn't say how old he was...

...Beginning at Lawrence, he had to take time off from the picket lines, every now and again, for a stretch in jail...

...V Then there was silence, five weeks of silence from A. J. Muste, whose prodigious capacity for continuing correspondence wherever he was had always been a wonder...

...what was there to learn...

...But he was not an intelligent revolutionary...

...One of the other tough-ies of the revolution said it simpler: "Once a Christer, always a Christer...

...How can a "good administrator" and a "good mass worker" fail to produce anything "tangible in the way of organization...

...That was one of the weaknesses, it seems to me, of Muste's methods...

...He's a Christer...

...A. J. would shuffle disjointedly away from each of those birthday dinners with an old satchel full of money, and when the novitiates whispered, "Won't he even buy a new suit...

...a little Roosevelt prosperity was all it needed to go back to its open opposition to organzing the unorganized, and to the class war...