A.J. Muste
Biographical Background
Abraham Johannes Muste, born on January 8, 1885, died on
February 11, 1967. Known to the public as A.J. Muste and to his
friends and associates simply as "A.J.," he was a
remarkable and in some ways enigmatic figure bridging the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Born in Holland, he was brought to the U.S. as a child of six
and raised by a Republican family in the strict Calvinist
traditions of the Dutch Reformed Church. In 1909 he was ordained
a minister in that church, and married Anna Huizenga, with whom
he was to share the next 40 years and raise three children. In
the normal course of events Muste would have lived out his life
within those conservative limits, perhaps with theological
distinction, but without great impact on the temporal world. His
record at the time of his ordination: class valedictorian at
Hope College, captain of the basketball team, a magna cum laude
degree from Union Theological Seminary.
Yet, A.J. soon made a decision that would begin a lifetime of
carefully considered radical activism. In the 1912 presidential
election he cast his vote for Eugene Victor Debs. In 1914,
increasingly uncomfortable with the Reformed Church, he became
pastor of a Congregational Church. When war broke out in Europe,
A.J. became a pacifist, inspired by the Christian mysticism of
the Quakers. Three years later these beliefs cost him his
church. He then started working with the fledging American Civil
Liberties Union in Boston, and took a church post with the
Friends in Providence. In 1919, when the textile industry
strikers appealed for help from the religious community, he
suddenly found himself thrust into the center of the great labor
strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts. In the early 1920s A.J.
became director of the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New
York. This school was of enormous importance in labor history;
its curriculum consisted of the theory and practice of labor
militancy--so much so that the American Federation of Labor
found Brookwood Labor College a considerable embarrassment. The
young Dutch Reformed minister had become a respected--and
controversial--figure in the trade union movement.
For several years during the 1920s he served as Chairman of
the Fellowship of Reconciliation but steadily drifted toward
revolutionary politics, and in 1929 he helped form the
Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), seeking to
reform the AF of L from within. When the Depression broke like a
storm over America, the CPLA became openly revolutionary and was
instrumental in forming the American Workers Party in 1933--a
"democratically organized revolutionary party" in
which A.J. played the leading role.
A.J. had now completed one stage of his evolution, from
conservative young pastor to revolutionary American Marxist. He
abandoned his Christian pacifism and became an avowed
Marxist-Leninist. He was a key figure in organizing the sit-down
strikes of the 1930s and, cooperating with James Cannon of the
Trotskyist movement, he merged his own political group with
Cannon's, forming the Trotskyist Workers Party of America.
At this point something occurred in A.J.'s life which cannot
be fully explained. In 1936, troubled by certain questions
regarding revolutionary activity, he took a ship to Europe,
where, in Norway, he met with Leon Trotsky. He had left the U.S.
as a Marxist-Leninist, but returned that same year as a
Christian pacifist. It is not clear what caused the religious
experience he had on the trip, but he was deeply changed. For
the second time in his life, A.J. burned his bridges behind him,
although he did remain active in the labor movement, heading the
Presbyterian Labor Temple on 14th Street in Manhattan. In 1940
he became Executive Secretary of the religious pacifist
organization, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a post he held
until 1953.
The period from 1940 to 1953 was, in its own way, as
turbulent as the 1930s. It covered the war years, the beginning
of the Cold War, the McCarthy period. Under A.J.'s leadership,
FOR stimulated the organization of the Congress on Racial
Equality, the first of the militant civil rights groups. At the
age of 68 A.J. "retired." The year was 1953 and for
most persons life would have been filled with enough risk,
enough drama, to permit settling into a respected twilight
period. He had lived through the Depression as a major radical
leader, heavily influenced the labor movement, and had opposed
two world wars. He had rallied American pacifists in their
darkest hours of World War II, defending young men who refused
military service, fighting complex theological battles with
those who sought to place the moral weight of Christianity at
the disposal of the State. Yet, he remained virtually unknown to
the general public. He was considered by those who worked with
him to have one of the sharpest political minds in America. But
it was an almost perversely prophetic mind, taking him always
one step beyond the point the general public--or even his
followers--was prepared to go. His associates learned from him
directly--from discussions, the dialogues, and actions which
marked their relationships with him. He wrote several books, but
he communicated--and influenced--best on a personal level.
A.J.'s life after retirement was not rich with honors but
with action. He continued for nearly another twenty years to
trouble the society around him. He became the leader of the
Committee for Nonviolent Action, an organization whose members
sailed ships into nuclear test zones in the Pacific, hopped
barbed wire fences into nuclear installations in this country,
and went out in rowboats to try to block the launching of
American nuclear submarines. In 1961 a team of pacifists
completed an extraordinary walk all the way from San Francisco
to Moscow, and thanks largely to the diplomacy of A.J., was able
to carry the message of unilateral disarmament not only to towns
all across the country, but even into Moscow's Red Square.
A.J. was close to the emerging liberation movements in
Africa, and helped organize the World Peace Brigade which worked
closely with Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of
Tanzania. African leaders often met first with A.J. on their
visits to this country--and only later with the State
Department. A.J. served as close friend and mentor to Martin
Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King.
But it was with the onset of the Vietnam War and its fierce
popular opposition that A.J. entered what may have been the most
active period of his life. He alone was trusted by all the
radical groups, he alone was able to act as the center around
which they could organize the vast coalition of energies which
became the American movement to end that war. In 1966 he led a
group a pacifists to Saigon, where after trying to demonstrate
for peace, they were arrested and deported. Late that same year,
he flew with a small team of religious leaders to Hanoi where
they met with Ho Chi Minh. Old men meeting in the midst of war,
one of them committed to the path of violent change, the other
to nonviolence. Less than a month later, A.J. died suddenly in
New York City. At his death messages of condolence came from
sources as diverse as Ho Chi Minh and Robert Kennedy.
Memorial services brought speakers from the Church, the Trade
Union movement, and from both the Communist and Socialist
Workers Parties. To an outsider it must have seemed
incomprehensible that a single man could have so broad a range
of friends. To his associates he was a remarkably warm person,
one who loved baseball and poetry. To audiences, however, he
seemed more distant, and while his speaking style was direct and
immediate, one listener said she knew, having heard him, what
the prophets sounded like. His integrity was beyond question. He
tolerated disagreement but achieved remarkable loyalty. He did
not have disciples but co-workers. A brilliant thinker, he left
behind no single body of theoretical work--but a small army of
women and men whose lives, hearts and thinking were forever
radically changed by knowing him.
There are two themes that ran through A.J. Muste's life so
clearly and marked his own actions so decisively, that the
conflict between them became a dialectic, never resolved. One
theme was peace, nonviolence, profound reverence for life.
The
other theme was social justice. To respect life meant to
struggle to achieve social justice, yet the struggle for social
justice invariably disturbed the peace and risked the
nonviolence so central to A.J. The life-destroying institutions
of injustice which A.J. saw around him were intolerable--yet
violent social change was also intolerable. It was this
"dialectic" which led him into the Marxist-Leninist
movement and then back into the religious pacifist movement.
Those who worked most closely with him are convinced that he was
never fully able to leave behind his Christian mysticism when he
was a Marxist-Leninist, and that on his return to the Church he
brought with him much of his Marxism.
No authentic honor can be done to the memory of the man and
his life if we select one theme and ignore the other. Few people
have been so deeply committed at the same time both to peace and
to social justice, so fully aware of the difficulty of
reconciling these two demands, and so intent on making that
effort.
One of A.J. Muste's favorite selections from poetry is surely
one which he earned as a final homage:
I think
continually of those who were truly great--
The names of
those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at
their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun
they traveled a short while towards the sun.
And left the
vivid air signed with their honor.
-Stephen Spender
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