"The survival of democracy
depends on the renunciation of violence
and the development of nonviolent means
to combat evil and advance the good."
A. J. Muste
"Only the nonviolent can apply therapy to the violent."
A. J. Muste
"There is no way to peace; peace is the way."
A. J. Muste
Abraham Johannes Muste was born in Zeeland of the Netherlands on January
8, 1885; his family brought him to the United States at the age of six and
raised him in Michigan as a Calvinist. He graduated from Union Theological
Seminary in New York in 1909, and married that year. He was ordained a minister,
but during World War I his pacifist convictions and ideas led to his resignation.
Moving to Boston in 1918 Muste formed a Comradeship of pacifists and
began to observe the labor situation at the Lawrence textile mills. He felt
that during the war the pacifists had not risked their lives, but the strike
was an opportunity to see if nonviolence really works. Muste raised money
for the strikers and was soon made the executive secretary of the strike
committee for 30,000 strikers. A.J. placed himself at the head of the picket
line and was beat to exhaustion by the police and arrested. Several weeks
into the strike the police tried to provoke violence by lining up machine
guns and having a labor spy urge the strikers to overcome them. Muste suggested
that the strikers take the following courageous action:
I told them, in line with the strike committee's decision, that to permit ourselves to be provoked into violence would mean defeating ourselves; that our real power was in our solidarity and our capacity to endure suffering rather than to give up the right to organize; that no one could "weave wool with machine guns;" that cheerfulness was better for morale than bitterness and that therefore we would smile as we passed the machine guns and the police on the way from the hall to the picket lines around the mill. I told the spies, who were sure to be in the audience, to go and tell the police and the mill managers that this was our policy.
This speech was greeted by cheers, and they went out, laughing and singing.
Later Muste's room was broken into by a strong arm squad, but he was not
there. A colleague of his was taken out into the country, beat terribly,
and left senseless in a ditch. After fifteen weeks the workers were weakening.
Muste and the leaders successfully urged them to stay out for a week longer,
but decided they would not pressure them after that. Muste was leaving town
to report their failure to the union headquarters when he was contacted by
management to arrange a settlement granting the strikers' demands.
Muste served as general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers for
over two years. Strikes occurred somewhere almost every week. From 1921 to
1933 he was the educational director of Brookwood Labor College. During the
Depression he worked with the labor movement, the Unemployed Leagues, the
Workers Party, the sit-down strikes, and the forming of the C.I.O. Muste
helped start the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) which offered
a radical alternative to the Communist Party. In 1936 he helped organize
a strike of the Goodyear Tire workers in Akron, Ohio, which was the first
time the sit-in tactic was used in the American labor movement. Also in 1936
A.J. gave up his Trotskyism and returned to Christian pacifism for the rest
of his life, saying that God is love and that "love is the central thing
in the universe." Love, he felt, must be carried into every aspect of family
life, race relations, labor movement, political activity, and international
relations.
In 1940 A.J. Muste published Non-violence in an Aggressive World
outlining a Christian pacifist approach to revolution in a war-torn world.
He describes the interrelationships of the three revolutionary reform movements
to which he was committed in the fields of religion, economics, and politics
- namely Christianity, socialism, and democracy. He urges a pacifist revolution
which will enlighten minds and redirect wills. With unity and solidarity among
the workers and using nonviolent methods, Muste predicts there will be less
economic and social dislocation than in most revolutions. He criticizes the
totalitarian repression, terrorism, and conformity of some post revolutionary
regimes, and he calls instead for democratic and brotherly life. Although
he considers struggling against injustice by any means to be nobler than cowardice,
Muste's experience in the labor movement led him to believe that violence
was always self-defeating. "The oppressed will make surer and faster progress
if they eschew violence and depend, as they do mainly depend in their organizing
and strike activities, on their solidarity, courage, capacity for suffering
and sacrifice, and on non-cooperation where injustice becomes extreme." Instead
of using national armies, Muste saw the need for an international police
force. A political federation built on fair economic arrangements will be
held together by mutual benefits, making armies unnecessary. He points out
that there is a necessary connection between democracy and nonviolence; when
external force is used, freedom is lost. Racism and nationalism which promote
war are destructive to democracy, corrupting the external and internal relations
of a country. Imperialism in foreign policy likewise causes injustice and
oppression at home as well as abroad through the "crushing burden of militarism
and totalitarian war." Muste advocates unilateral disarmament, pointing out
how reluctant people are to fight and kill in a war. How could they be led
to slaughter a helpless population? "With much less effort than is required
to put a nation on a war-basis, it could be organized to meet, confuse, and
rout an invader with nonviolent noncooperation." He concludes that pacifism
is based on love and fellowship and treating one's neighbor as oneself; our
resources for living this life of love have hardly been tapped at all so
far.
In an essay on "The World Task of Pacifism" in 1941 Muste declared that
as long as people believe that war is a solution to social problems, then
human resources will be devoted to "forging diabolically effective instruments
of slaughter and destruction." Once this delusion has been dispelled, then
a new order will be built. In another essay that year he suggested the following:
Christian realism would lead us to renounce war preparation and war as obviously suicidal; to offer to surrender our own special privileges; to participate in lowering tariff walls, in providing access to basic resources on equitable terms to all peoples; to spend the billions we shall otherwise squander on war preparations, and war, for the economic rehabilitation of Europe and Asia, for carrying a great "offensive" of food, medicine, and clothing to the stricken peoples of the world; and to take our full share of responsibility for building an effective federal world government.
In 1942 Muste suggested that the United States enter into negotiations with all the nations in the war with the following proposals:
1) the U.S. will help build a federal world government;
2) the U.S. will invest billions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe and Asia;
3) "no attempt shall be made to fasten sole war guilt on any nation or group of nations;"
4) subject nations such as India, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, and Holland must be granted full self-determination;
5) "all peoples should be assured of equitable access to markets and to essential raw materials;"
6) to further democracy the U.S. should provide decent housing, adequate medical and hospital service, and equal educational facilities for all its people, "including Negroes and Orientals;"
7) the U.S. must repudiate racism and call on Germany and other countries to do the same; and
8) drastic reduction of armaments by all nations should move all rapidly to an economy of peace.
As early as 1943 Muste recommended the use of nonviolent methods to bring
an end to Jim Crow practices of racial discrimination. He was Executive Secretary
of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) from 1940 until 1953 where he influenced
civil rights leaders such as James Farmer and Bayard Rustin who were FOR staff
members. In 1942 they founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Martin
Luther King, Jr. and others were also influenced by Muste's nonviolence philosophy
and tactics. During the war he gave moral support to conscientious objectors,
and in 1947 he sponsored a session of draft card burning. Muste refused to
pay Federal income tax from 1948 on. After the war he completely rejected
Communism, but during the McCarthy period Muste spoke out for the civil rights
of Communists. He called for the cessation of hostilities in Korea, urged
the United Nations to stop acting as a war agency, advocated that U.S. abandon
war and adopt nonviolence, and promoted the spirit of pacifism.
Muste helped organize and participated in many direct action campaigns.
In 1955 he joined Dorothy Day and others in refusing to take cover in a New
York civil defense drill. On August 7,1957 he participated in a vigil protesting
nuclear weapons tests near Las Vegas, Nevada. The following year he was an
advisor in the project of sailing the Golden Rule into a bomb-test
area. He chaired the "Walk for Peace Committee" which included the American
Friends Service Committee, The Catholic Worker, the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, Peacemakers, the War Resisters League, and the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom. For the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA)
Muste coordinated the Omaha Action project and was arrested as one of the
trespassers at the Mead Missile Base. He considered nuclear war politically
irrational, morally indefensible, and a hideous atrocity. Even preparation
for such a war is a degradation of mankind. Neither the aims of Communism
nor those of Christian democracy can be advanced or even salvaged after a
nuclear war. To threaten the obliteration of an enemy people he referred
to as an extreme mental sickness. The real enemy is war.
In December 1959 Muste traveled to Africa to help coordinate a protest
against French nuclear bomb-tests in the Sahara. Meanwhile the Peace Walk
had gone from San Francisco to Moscow. About 80,000 leaflets were distributed
in the Soviet Union; the demonstrators spoke to meetings of several hundred
people every night. Muste felt national barriers had been transcended in favor
of a common humanity. In 1961 an experimental World Peace Brigade was formed
at a conference in Beirut, Lebanon, under the direction of Muste, Michael
Scott, and Jayaprakash Narayan. A training center for nonviolent action was
established in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Muste hoped this was a beginning
toward realizing Gandhi's concept of a world peace army (Shanti sena).
In the summer of 1962 the World Peace Brigade and others, such as the
CNVA, CND, and the Committee of 100, sponsored the voyage of Everyman
Ill to Leningrad to protest Soviet nuclear testing.
In the early Vietnam War era Muste was able to help bring together a
broad-based coalition of groups to protest. He helped to establish the policy
of refusing to accept the co-sponsorship of organizations that support war,
military build-up, or violence, although any individual accepting nonviolent
discipline could participate. In 1965 over 50,000 people paraded down Fifth
Avenue in New York. Again in this war he suggested that the United States
withdraw its forces and disarm. To young men facing conscription he always
recommended "holy disobedience." In 1966 Muste met with anti-war Buddhist
and Catholic leaders in Saigon. In January 1967 he met with Ho Chi Minh in
Hanoi to try to find ways to end the war. Muste died seventeen days later.
He was honored in New York at the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam
march.