Abraham Johannes Muste

• A. J. Muste
• Born: January 8, 1885
• Died: February 11, 1967

Clerygman, labor organizer and peace-movement activist, was born in Zierikzee, Zeeland, in the Netherlands, the first of two sons of Martin Muste and Adriana (Jonker) Muste, who also had three daughters. Martin Muste, who had been coachman to a provincial noble, emigrated with his family to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1891 and worked as a teamster. An Ellis Island inspector’s joking reference to Abraham Johannes as “Abraham Lincoln” was the beginning of a formative influence even stronger than the strict Calvinism of his immediate family. Growing up in Michigan in the 1890s, when, as he later wrote, “the Midwest in its own imagination and feeling still lived in the days of John Brown, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the martyred President,” he made the ideals of the abolition movement “part of my inmost being,” along with Emersonian ideas of individual responsibility.

After graduating from elementary school, where he won an essay contest on the topic of child labor, Muste entered the preparatory department of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He was graduated from the college at the age of twenty and delivered the valedictorian oration, entitled “The Problem of Discontent.” After teaching Greek and Latin for a year in Orange City, Iowa, he entered the Theological Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and was graduated in 1909. He also took lecture courses given by William James and John Dewey at Columbia University. In June 1909 he married Anna Huizenga, a college classmate and the daughter of a Dutch Reformed minister. After his ordination he became the first minister of the new Fort Washington Collegiate Church in New York City and soon afterward enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, from which he received his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1913.

Under the impact of experiences in New York City, the strict Calvinism of Muste’s youth cracked and crumbled. He became acquainted with the socialist leaders Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, served as a supply minister on the Lower East Side, talked about the Triangle Waist Company fire and the Paterson, New Jersey, textile strike, and began to read the Christian mystics. He voted the socialist ticket in 1912 (and thereafter throughout his life) and resigned his Fort Washington pastorate because he was unable to accept a literal interpretation of the Bible.

In 1915 Muste became minister of the First Congregational Church in Newtonville, Massachusetts. The following year he joined the Quaker-sponsored Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). As the United States became more deeply involved in World War I he moved closer to a pacifist interpretation of Scripture and in December 1917 resigned his pulpit. For a time he did volunteer work for the American Civil Liberties Union, of which he was a founder, and was a minister with the Society of Friends meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1918 the Mustes moved into a pacifist commune in the Back Bay area of Boston, and there Muste became involved in the labor activity that was to occupy him for the next fifteen years. As a founding member of the Comradeship, a social-action group, he provided counseling in nonviolent tactics to the workers who participated in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of 1919, and he negotiated an end to the strike as executive secretary of the strike committee. After serving as general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America, in 1921 he became educational director of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, where he taught history and social problems. He was elected a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers in 1923. He was a frequent contributor to Labor Age, which advocated the unionization of mass-production industries. This position caused the publication to be condemned by the craft-organized American Federation of Labor, and Brookwood became known as a hotbed of radicalism.

For Muste the Brookwood years were a time of personal struggle between Christian pacifism and revolutionary socialism that ended in a temporary victory for the latter. After serving as chairman of the Fellowship of Reconciliation from 1926 to 1929, Muste helped found the Conference for Progressive Labor Action and as its chairman allied himself with a faction that believed in the necessity of violent change. In 1933 Muste left Brookwood and with his associates formed the American Workers party, which became the Workers party of the United States and was identified with Trotskyists. Later he would describe this detour into Marxist politics as a highly educational demonstration of the futility of compromise with a so-called lesser evil.

In 1936, while standing with his wife in the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris, Muste experienced a religious reconversion, and although he remained a socialist he returned to Christianity. He rejoined the Fellowship of Reconciliation as industrial director, and after serving for a time as director of the Presbyterian Labor Temple in New York City he became executive secretary of the FOR, a post he held until 1953.

A tall, ungainly figure with the air of a country schoolmaster, Muste, whom Reinhold Niebuhr called “a perfect innocent,” was in fact a sophisticated fundraiser and skilled negotiator. But “A.J.,” as he was always called, remained skeptical of conventional liberalism, believing instead in drastic individual and social change. Although he enjoyed a rich family life with his wife and children—Nancy (born in 1916), Connie (born in 1920), and John (born in 1924)—he had little use for the trappings of domesticity, and after the death of his wife in 1954 he lived in a single book-cluttered room.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation opposed American participation in World War II, but it did not cooperate with America First, believing that the isolationist group was not opposed to war, merely to war against Germany. Throughout the war Muste and the FOR worked with the government in its Civilian Public Service Camp program, which found alternative-service jobs for conscientious objectors, incurring the hostility of the radicals among them who opposed any cooperation with a wartime government.

After World War II Muste divided his time between domestic reform and the international peace movement. In both areas he was an influential advocate of nonviolent protest as a technique of social action. Some of Muste’s followers founded the Congress of Racial Equality, and in the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “I would say unequivocally that the current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations field is due more to A.J. than to anyone else in the country.” In India Muste was called the American Gandhi.

During the period of civil-defense drills in New York City in the 1950s, Muste cooperated with Dorothy Day and others in refusing to take shelter and in organizing protests against the program. In 1958, as national chairman of the Committee for Non-Violent Action, he participated in the attempt to send a ship into the nuclear test zone of the Marshall Islands as a demonstration against the tests. The following year, when Muste was almost seventy-five, he served a nine-day jail term for scaling a fence during a protest at an Omaha, Nebraska, missile site. He was a leading participant in other protests in Africa and the Soviet Union, at the White House, and at the United Nations headquarters in New York City.

Early in 1967, a few weeks before his death at the age of eighty-two, Muste, in company with two other elderly clergymen, journeyed to Hanoi to sound out Ho Chi Minn on prospects for peace in the Vietnam war. This was his last major effort in a long life devoted to building what he called the “beloved community, a human community based on love.”

Muste’s collected essays are found in Which Party for the American Worker? (1936); The Automobile Industry and Organized Labor (1937); Non-Violence in An Aggressive World (1940); The World Task of Pacifism (1941); War Is the Enemy (1942); Not By Might: Christianity the Way to Human Decency (1947); How To Deal With a Dictator (1954); and N. Hentoff, ed., Essays of A. J. Muste (1967). Biographical sources include N. Hentoff, Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste (1963), and Current Biography (1965).