On a rainy afternoon in May 1957, seventy-two-year-old Abraham Johannes (A. J.) Muste sat down to write his autobiography. Unfortunately, he would never complete the volume, as he was repeatedly interrupted by the pressing work of organizing protests against nuclear testing and aiding the African American civil rights movement. In his “Sketches for an Autobiography” that were published inLiberationmagazine, the present always intruded, precluding a stable, linear narrative. Writing an autobiography, Muste mused, “relates to the present or immediate past, to the world in which the writer now lives, not the one into which he was born.” For...

Muste was born in January 1885 in Zierikzee, a port town in the province of Zeeland in the Netherlands. Zierikzee, Muste learned later in life, was apparently the Dutch “equivalent of our Podunk,” small, poor, and remote.¹ Indeed, from the nineteenth century to the present, Zierikzee and Zeeland as a whole have had a reputation for economic backwardness and religious orthodoxy. A series of islands located on the extreme south-western coastal zone of the Netherlands, much of Zeeland actually lies below sea level and is protected by a system of river and sea dikes. This location gave rise to a...

When Muste graduated from Hope College, he had a choice of attending either Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, or New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey. The choice, as Muste understood it at the time, was between the “restricted life” of the Dutch ethnic community and the metropolitan possibilities of the broader United States. He had “come to feel” that his “future was in the English speaking community, part of the United States, and not in the Dutch community of the [Midwest]. In that sense very definitely I wanted to get away.”¹ The decision also reflected his craving for...

“It was quite an experience,” Muste recalled in his memoirs, to be driven from his pulpit for holding pacifist views, but it was “nothing” compared to the transition from preaching at a Quaker meeting to the leadership “of a turbulent strike of 30,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.” In the context of the postwar Red Scare, there was “no middle course”; by supporting the strike, he had placed himself on the side of anarchy and violence not only in the eyes of the authorities, but also among many of the liberals and pacifists whom he had counted as allies and...

As Brookwood grew, so did Muste’s stature in the labor movement. By mid-decade, he was firmly established as a central figure within labor’s progressive wing. Among a myriad of other honors and activities, he was called in to advise and mediate strikes, particularly those involving textile workers; invited to speak on workers’ education and other topics to unions and central labor bodies throughout the country; elected a vice president of the AFT and as vice president of the National Association for Child Development; served as a member of the Central Trades and Labor Council of Greater New York and as...

Muste and his comrades in the CPLA “stood for what was then hailed as ‘practical labor idealism.’” As Len De Caux observed in his memoir, “Between the hidebound right and wild left,” they “tried to steer a left-of-center course.”¹ Hence they criticized the AFL on a deeper and more profound level than its failure to adopt industrial unionism. Musteites argued that the fundamental problem with the labor movement was its “lack of an intangible virile unifying force in the form of a labor culture and a labor idealism.” This analysis unified CPLA activism; whether focused on inter-union politics, organizing drives,...

In its first two years of existence, the Musteite movement represented a range of progressive opinion, including sympathetic labor union officials, militant rank and filers, Socialists, pacifists, and radical Christians. Indeed, it was initially more progressive than revolutionary, with the CPLA’s provisional character giving the movement a flexible and democratic quality. But, over the course of the early 1930s, the Musteites increasingly assumed a more revolutionary posture, a position that was reinforced by the influx of Marxist intellectuals into the movement. In 1932, the CPLA institutionalized its move to the left by redefining itself as a permanent, revolutionary vanguard organization....

Over the course of 1933, Muste and other CPLA leaders made preparations to transform the organization into a revolutionary party. Experience had taught them that the other parties competing for the allegiance of workers and radicals were too consumed by the 1919 split of the Socialist Party and events in the Soviet Union. It was time for a new, fresh approach, free from the entanglements of the past, and rooted in the experiences of American workers. As Calverton remarked to Muste in October 1933, he was “convinced that we are on the right track and that it is you, with...

Over the course of the late 1930s Muste would draw upon his experiences in the labor movement and the secular left, his understanding of the prophetic tradition, and his religious faith to craft a new radical politics based on nonviolence. In 1941, when the FOR hired him to lead the organization, he seized the opportunity to translate this vision into action, in the process helping to make Gandhian nonviolence a central feature of American political culture.

The popularity of World War II created a deep chasm between pacifists and the mainstream, but membership in the FOR grew as true believers...

In their opposition to American intervention in World War II, Muste and his fellow pacifists would fail to adequately grapple with the ideological and moral challenges presented by the rise of fascism. Still, their thought had a deeply self-reflexive quality that provided them with an acute sensitivity to the ways in which the United States violated its own democratic ideals. We have already seen how this led them to experiment with Gandhian nonviolence and American race relations, but it was also evident in their opposition to the militarization of American society during the war. While their predictions of an incipient...

Unable to persuade the Peacemakers to fully endorse the idea of a third way in opposition to the foreign policies of both the United States and the Soviet Union, Muste supported his young protégés George Houser and Bill Sutherland when they gave up on trying to change American race relations and decided to focus their energies on building support for the antiapartheid movement in South Africa and for African independence more broadly. In 1952, Houser resigned as a secretary of the FOR to found Americans for South African Resistance to raise money and awareness about the Defiance Campaign, and in...

Starting around 1960, Muste’s efforts to internationalize the peace movement increasingly focused on involving nationalist leaders in the decolonizing world. He had long harbored hopes that anticolonial movements might serve as the fulcrum for building a nonaligned, “third way.” Yet his efforts in this direction had been hindered by the intensity of the Cold War, both at home and abroad, as well as the reluctance of the FOR and the Peacemakers to fully endorse these efforts. The Sahara protest, however, rekindled his hopes. In Accra, much to his surprise, some nationalist leaders had not only welcomed pacifist assistance, but asked...

Muste’s criticism of Cold War policy in Asia had been long-standing. He observed as early as 1946 that French resistance to Vietnamese self-determination did not augur well for the region. With the defeat of France at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, he warned that the American obsession with preventing the spread of Communism would lead it into an unwinnable war. The massive buildup of aid to the South Vietnamese during the Kennedy administration, even in the face of the reactionary policies of the Diem regime, convinced him that the peace movement, as well as activist forces more broadly, should focus...

Few Americans recognize A. J. Muste’s name today, though his influence can be found in both the dominant culture and its radical and pacifist margins. A mural of Muste by the radical cartoonist and muralist Christopher Cardinale now graces the outer wall of 339 Lafayette Street in New York City, a building known to the local activist community as “the peace pentagon” and which houses the A. J. Muste Memorial Institute, the national offices of the WRL and WILPF, and other activist groups. In 2010, theNew York Timespublished an article on the “grannies,” a group of elderly men...