Foxy Prophet
Robinson, Jo Ann Ooiman
BOOKS Foxy Prophet ABRAHAM WENT OUT by Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson Temple University Press. 341 pp. $22.50. This biography of A.J. Muste by Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson may come as a revelation to those...
...It was only over A.J.'s dead body that the war went on for another eight grisly years...
...While the American Federation of Labor was denouncing the Lawrence workers' walkouts as "revolutionary," A.J...
...A.J.—born Abraham Johannes Muste in 1885 in the Netherlands—was a stubborn, gently zealous Zeelander who became a major link among all these movements—most notably in the 1960s, when he emerged as a crucial mediator in the mobilizations against the new Asian war...
...Early in the century he left his immigrant home in Michigan and the Dutch Reformed Church to attend New York's Union Theological Seminary...
...Muste Memorial Institute in New York, at $6.50...
...At the home of a former Brookwood lecturer in Norway, Muste met Trotsky...
...found Trotsky to be "simple, direct, unassuming," with "utter lack of bitterness," and apparently retained this admiration through his subsequent abandonment of Trotskyism...
...to get out and work—for peace, for human rights, for a better world...
...Houser went on to direct the American Committee on Africa from the late 1950s until his recent retirement...
...When he died early in 1967, the fighting had not yet reached its worst depths and the movement had just begun to get itself together...
...peace, labor, and civil rights movements should borrow it, or better yet buy it, despite the price...
...In the following decades—the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—A.J...
...and Anna were "completely captivated" by the exile and his wife...
...Even those who have had varying degrees of acquaintance with Muste and the peace, labor, civil liberties, and civil rights movements he worked with may here discover inter-relationships and details that had never seemed clear before...
...Hentoff and Sidney Lens are among the many sources deftly drawn on by Robinson in Abraham Went Out...
...denounced the American role for the first time before several thousand people who turned up at the United Nations in the rain...
...Every library should have Abraham Went Out, and everyone curious about the Twentieth Century history of U.S...
...Muste became national secretary, and Cannon became editor of The Militant, but these alignments did not last long...
...Cannon had accurately warned of Muste's "terrible background of the church...
...Around that time he joined the newly formed Fellowship of Reconciliation and met Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin, for whose National Civil Liberties Bureau (later the American Civil Libertie's Union) he became "sort of a New England representative...
...and his Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) worked with a range of groups on the political left, establishing Unemployed Leagues and supporting defense committees for the "Scottsboro Boys" and similar cases...
...In the spring mobilization of 1967— which A.J...
...While the newsmakers and noisemakers were out capturing the media, the octogenarian was behind the scenes trying to get everyone's act together to stop the war...
...dissolved and many defected to the Communist Party...
...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...
...worked within the Fellowship of Reconciliation and alongside Friends and other religious groups on direct action projects which their members might not have dared consider earlier: Freedom Rides into the South, peace marches to Moscow, sailing into nuclear-testing areas in the Pacific and walking into them in the Sahara, climbing over fences of nuclear missile sites...
...Farmer headed CORE intermittently for several decades and finally left it to work with labor...
...Rustin later became executive secretary of the War Resisters League, which lent him to Martin Luther King Jr...
...A somewhat livelier, less expensive, but less complete version of A.J...
...experienced a reconversion which made him decide to leave leftist politics and return to religious work...
...The Massachusetts textile mill strikes drew Muste into his first labor activism...
...When Muste's continuing labor involvements precipitated one of the few controversies that he apparently did not try to resolve amicably, he left Brook-wood to work more directly in labor and politics...
...Muste by Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson may come as a revelation to those who grew up during the Vietnam years believing the peace movement got its start then...
...Subsequently A.J...
...for the 1963 civil rights march on Washington—an event biographer Robinson oddly fails to mention—and then left the peace movement to direct the A. Philip Randolph Institute and settle into the present New York neo-conservative milieu...
...was instrumental in rallying support for the strikers...
...This is Nat Hentoff s Peace Agitator, first published in 1963...
...Meditating in St...
...Unable to justify the labyrinthine twists and turns of leftist politics, Muste found himself relatively isolated when the Workers Party-U.S.A...
...Muste and his wife Anna, exhausted by labor struggles, were sent by friends on a vacation abroad...
...Muste's life has just been reprinted in paperback by the A.J...
...did not fear ridicule or arrest, and he had more than his share of both...
...really be meaning what he said...
...Hentoff has called Robinson's book "a lucid, richly detailed full-scale biography of one of the truly great prophetic spirits of the century...
...An unnecesssary bit of advice, perhaps, since those who knew and admired A.J...
...The Providence Friends Meeting then took him on as minister...
...proteges and coworkers included war resisters Dave Dellinger and Ralph Di Gia, 1980 Socialist Presidential candidate David McReynolds, and writer-peace activist-feminist Barbara Deming...
...Other A.J...
...were usually up to their ears in activism...
...Among them were Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and George Houser, all of whom developed the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the early 1940s under A.J.'s guidance in the Fellowship of Reconciliation...
...As it turned out, it was perhaps as much a decision to activate and politicize religious and peace groups...
...If Foxy Grandpa's practical religious beliefs included anything like a heaven (which I doubt A.J...
...spent much time thinking about), his spirit is probably there organizing bottom-rank angels and reconciling celestial differences...
...He remained in the East to become a minister in several denominations before parting with the Congregationalists during World War I over his increasingly antiwar views...
...Sulpice in Paris, A.J...
...After his death, the mobilization newsletter urged Muste friends and followers "in lieu of flowers...
...Others tired and dropped out, but, as poet Jackson MacLow put it, this "true Foxy Grandpa" perhaps lasted as long as he did "by disguising himself as a skinny old preacher who couldn't (could he...
...Late in 1933, the CPLA was transformed into the American Workers Party, a "Musteite" group which helped to achieve several crucial labor victories and to lay the groundwork for the CIO...
...In 1934, Muste, along with Sidney Hook, Louis Budenz, and others in the AWP, negotiated with James Cannon, Arne Sweback, and Max Schacht-man of the Trotskyist-led Communist League of America to merge the two groups into the Workers Party-U.S.A...
...In her panoramic account of a man as well as a movement, Jo Ann Robinson has meticulously chronicled all this and much more...
...By the time Vietnam came along, getting disparate groups to try to understand each other and work together was an old story for A.J...
...In 1921 he was asked to chair the faculty of the newly formed Brookwood Labor College, which educated labor organizers and activists...
...had worked hard on but didn't live to see—Martin Luther King Jr...
...However, A.J.'s quiet, persistent guidance in the peace and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s occurred only late in his long career...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
