Where It Was Happening
MAYER, PETER
BOOKS Where It Was Happening by PETER MAYER A man may become the representa-¦t*- tive figure for an idea or movement as a result of a number of factors: he may exhibit gifts as a publicist; he...
...He [felt] the heart of man requires radical redemption and his institutions must, as a result, be changed accordingly...
...In one of those painful coincidences of which there are many in the world of men and books, this first retrospective anthology of A. J. Muste's writings was published barely a week after his death...
...In the summer of 1908 he became a supply preacher on the Lower East Side and began to read radical writers...
...Recalling this period he wrote: "For the first time in my life I had really seen, and lived in, slums...
...A. J., however, probably would have been indifferent to the issue of whether any of his writing would survive him...
...It was originally delivered as a Commencement Day address at Hope College, Michigan, in 1905, and perhaps characteristically was entitled "The Problem of Discontent...
...The Essays of A. J. Muste, edited by Nat Hentoff...
...Out of a deep religious engagement and long study in the theory and practice of nonviolence, he never said "no" to a violent course without proposing an alternative...
...For thirteen years he was director of the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, that unique institution for educating workers for leading roles in the labor movement...
...He seemed to choose a kind of literary journalism because his concerns were with the day, with conflict and confrontation...
...To those who did not regularly read A. J.'s writings, The Essays, because of their extraordinary emphasis on personal commitment in thought and action, offer an opportunity to encounter the man...
...In the Thirties, A. J. became one of the outstanding leaders of the Trotskyist section of the Communist labor movement in America, a period in which he "detoured," as he later put it, from his basically pacifist principles...
...In the war fever of 1917, he, under pressure, resigned his Newtonville post, refusing to remain silent or abandon his religious pacifism...
...As he was later to do when he argued unilateral disarmament in the nuclear age, he confessed to the risks implicit in any course of action, while advocating a moral position he felt was at least as efficacious in a world which knew evil...
...he spent an increasing amount of time with Quaker friends, and began to adopt a pacifist position...
...Not in a life of retirement and contemplation will [the educated man of today] find peace or a solution to the vexing problems of life...
...Like Reinhold Niebuhr in this period, he felt that he could no longer square his pacifist point of view with the possibilities of violence implicit in a revolutionary understanding of the class struggle...
...in a moral position to advocate non-violent methods to labor while we continue to be beneficiaries of the existing order...
...Character is built by action rather than thought...
...It made his presence and leadership in so many other causes—from disarmament and civil rights right up to his final efforts to end the war in Vietnam, the civil disobedience he chose in everything from bomb drills to visits abroad—more meaningful for those who went to jail with him, or who heard of him, or who watched him...
...Nor can anyone really with good conscience advocate abstention from violence to the masses of labor in revolt, unless he is himself identified in spirit with labor and helping it with all his might to achieve its rights and to realize its ideals...
...his first book after World War II, Not By Might (1947), dealt with the problem of Christian pacifism in the nuclear age...
...Very likely A. J. Muste, who died in February at the age of eighty two, was such a representative figure—"the foremost Christian pacifist of our time," he was sometimes called—for many of the above reasons, but most importantly for the last one...
...He adopted a thorough-going religious pacifist position which he maintained for the rest of his life...
...This position was the connecting thread in his varied activities for more than sixty years, and he was perhaps correct in viewing his Trotskyist period as a valuable "detour...
...This book ends appropriately with a piece entitled "The Movement To End The War In Vietnam...
...he analyzed politically the possible effects of both intervention and non-intervention...
...or he may display an uncommon quality of mind joined with both a delight in, and fearlessness of, action...
...It often appeared over the years that nothing he wrote would "hold up," so deeply was he involved in the issues of the day...
...Twenty years later he considered its point of view intact...
...in such a world a non-revolutionary pacifist is a contradiction in terms, a monstrosity...
...he may have a charismatic quality, so that others follow him, following often enough his personality and not his ideas...
...515 pp...
...In his remarkable essay, "War Is The Enemy," he did not simply oppose American entrance into World War II...
...In a world built on violence, one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist...
...It is good to have included his first published work, since it seems to have made a point for a lifetime...
...If toward the end of a long life he became identified as the spokesman for the Christian pacifist, or pacifist, position, it was because he had thought and acted on what many others conventionally consider other fronts: in the ministry, in the labor unions, in the Negro revolution for civil rights...
...Preferences to A. J., however, did not imply joining forces with the lesser of two evils, the conventional practice...
...He broadly understood the inward complexity of any issue, in terms of the inter-relatedness of society's various parts...
...I had climbed stairs to call on sick and aged parishioners...
...I had walked the streets and parks on hot summer days and during the only slightly less oppressive evenings...
...The deep unrest of his soul is a divine call to battle...
...This was a very different poverty than that of the furniture-factory workers or even that of the poor farmers of the Middle West during cthe hard times.' " In the last months of 1914, A. J. felt he could no longer subscribe to the whole body of Calvinist thought and resigned his Fort Washington ministry...
...He was appointed first minister of the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in New York in the same year and began studies at that liberal bastion, Union Theological Seminary...
...The first part of the book, which appeared originally as "Sketches for an Autobiography" in Liberation between 1957 and 1960, reveals the depth of A. J.'s involvement in the radical movements of the century...
...Like Gandhi, an activist he much admired, he was always able to admit to possible preferences...
...He was soon principally involved in the labor struggles of the next two decades, and became prominent for his role in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, Textile Strike...
...He knew whereof he spoke, and his actions had both personal and historic precedent...
...But by 1936 he became convinced again that the resort to violence, whether in domestic or international issues, was a self-defeating mechanism...
...He and his wife moved to New-tonville, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he became minister of Central Congregational Church...
...Sometimes I had barely been able to endure the fetid smells and unceasing, raucous noises...
...He related the problem of minority rights to the class struggle, the class struggle to the problem of international warfare...
...His thought in this period was broadly influenced by his reading of the Christian mystics...
...As Hentoff writes in his introduction: "He . . . never believed that if there were no more war men would automatically become good...
...In 1912 he voted for Eugene V. Debs...
...Born in Holland, A. J. Muste immigrated with his parents to America in 1891., and he might easily have become a rather typical example of the Midwestern Americanism of the time...
...For more than sixty years he was, as we say today, where it was happening...
...At age twenty he wrote: "And the solution of the problem of human restlessness lies not in thought but in action, not in rest but in struggle...
...Reviewing Nat Hentoff's superb selection forces one into a consideration of the life of the man so many people knew as "A.J./' a life crowded with events paralleling a large proportion of the major social, political, and religious issues of our time...
...Bobbs-Merrill...
...Let him be 'with the van and the freemen' in humanity's varied struggle...
...A. J. was no stranger to organizational attacks, since he was always part of a traditionally splintered left...
...In reading Nat Hentoff's selections it seems clear that some of the essays (like "Pacifism and the Class War"), in spite of the fact that A. J.'s concerns were immediate, will become classic examples of the social literature of our time...
...yet above all he was able on so many occasions to organize not only individuals around him, but also groups...
...The man was rich in ideas and tireless and fearless in action...
...In 1928 he had written: "We are not...
...he may occupy the extreme position of any issue so consistently and tenaciously that he comes to stand for a kind of ideal...
...Let him plunge boldly into the conflict then...
...For a period he worked with the newly-formed Boston chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and was enrolled as a pastor in Providence in the Society of Friends...
...Detesting Hitler and Stalin, he could consider Churchill and Roosevelt, as well as the moral position historically of the Western democracies, and find something lacking there...
...He was at once a visionary and a prag-matist, and a bit of a prophet, too...
...His prose style was lean, yet it crackled and was frequently witty, and his background knowledge of everything from theology and baseball to constitutional issues involving civil liberties was broad indeed...
...His religious background was solidly in the Reformed Dutch church of his family, and he was ordained to the ministry in that church in 1909...
...A. J. was preeminently a radical...
...One of the reasons A. J.'s voice could command an audience for so many years and which comprised many different people—his supporters, but also his opponents...
...his contemporaries, but also those whose interest was general and whom he sought to enlist— lay in his never being a "single-cause pacifist...
...A. J. chose to write polemically...
...As a twenty-year-old college graduate he placed himself solidly in the field of action, and it is therefore our history which will remember him...
Vol. 31 • June 1967 • No. 6
