American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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was a general attitude in the Dutch churches that labor was associated with socialism and not a thing for Christian people.’’41 The strong presence of the conservative Dutch and the dominance of the furniture industry meant that Grand Rapids was known for many years as an ‘‘open-shop’’ town. Still, there was a residual labor culture; the Knights of Labor had been strong in the city until 1886, and skilled workers like the Woodcarvers and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners were active in the Trades and Labor Council, which organized a Labor Day parade every year that brought the Mustes and other residents out in droves.42
Muste’s childhood in Grand Rapids revolved around neighborhood, school, and church. The Mustes, who now had a fifth child, Willemina, lived in a small, drab house that belonged to the owners of the Quimby furniture factory. Next to the house was the lumberyard, where the Muste children played hide-and-seek; to the west was the Quimby lumber mill where Martin worked; and directly across the street was the ‘‘big house,’’ where the Quimby family lived. Muste frequently played with Irving Quimby, who was about the same age, despite Adriana’s fears that Martin would be fired for the presumption. Irving introduced Muste to the Quimby family library where, ‘‘breathlessly,’’ Muste read bound volumes of Harper’s and Century, which had been running series of articles on the Civil War that filled his head with romantic accounts of battles, marches, and sieges. Veterans who lived nearby at the Old Soldiers Home enthralled Muste as they tramped by on their way downtown, where—he later learned—they bought booze. Occasionally he managed to get one of them to talk. ‘‘What a day that was!’’43
School was for Muste an ‘‘utter fascination.’’ From the time he started he was the best speller and reader in the class. ‘‘School never started too early in the morning for my taste. The school day always seemed to rush by. The start of vacation was in its way an occasion, but the opening day of school after Labor Day was a much more joyful and momentous one.’’ There, his budding identity as an American was imbued with the missionary nationalism that was characteristic of nineteenth-century political culture. As Muste recalled of the ideological milieu in which he was raised, ‘‘Americans thought of themselves as the chosen people who were to bring the blessings of Christianity, democracy, prosperity and peace to all mankind.’’ ‘‘The Civil War had, of course, been a traumatic experience. . . . By the eighteen-nineties, however, the image that was communicated to us in the schools . . . [was that] God, in his inscrutable Providence, had inflicted upon us the tragedy of the war experience. The nation, North and South, had been crucified on the Cross of War. Did not the Bible teach that ‘without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin’?’’ Now, however, ‘‘the union was indissoluble.’’44
Impressed by the Dutch boy’s intellectual abilities, Muste’s teachers took a special interest in him. In eighth grade, the principal of his school encouraged him to write an essay on child labor for an annual contest sponsored by the Trades and Labor Council that he won. It is tempting to interpret Muste’s denunciation of child labor as growing out of his own experience, since, starting at age eleven, he spent his summers laboring with his father at the factory, but the principal furnished him with the research he used to write the essay. But it does tell us something about the twelve-year-old boy’s worldview. The essay, which reads like a sermon, begins by suggesting in Social Darwinist fashion that child labor ‘‘is the result of the brute nature in man; of the oppression of the weak by the strong.’’ It then provides a subtle yet ultimately conservative class analysis: ‘‘the rich oppressed the poor and made the children work,’’ which resulted in the emasculation of the male breadwinner, who becomes a loafer, ‘‘blaming the capitalists and the government,’’ while the mother nags incessantly. Fortunately for the American people, child labor was not as widespread in the United States as it was in England. The essay concludes didactically, with an appeal to follow the golden rule.45
Muste’s prize for winning the contest was $15 worth of books and publication of the essay in the Labor Day souvenir book, ‘‘one of the great experiences in my life.’’ Several of the books he chose indelibly shaped his character. An anthology of poems ‘‘helped develop a love for poetry which has been one of life’s greatest and most enduring joys’’; J. B. Green’s History of England fostered a lifelong interest in history; and, finally, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays had a ‘‘seminal influence. . . . With Lincoln, Emerson was a creator of that ‘American-Dream,’ which, along with the great passages of the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures, molded and nourished my mind and spirit.’’46
Muste’s reference to Emerson shows how public education exposed him to alternative worldviews. In contrast to the corporatist, determinist, and antiliberal thrust of the Reformed Church, Emerson preached a more modern creed of ‘‘self-reliance,’’ of the divinity within each person and of the self’s capacity for ‘‘an original relation to the universe.’’ His question was not ‘‘What can I know?’’ but ‘‘how can I live?’’47 Muste the prepubescent boy was hardly aware of the tensions between transcendentalism and Calvinism, but he was strongly influenced by the Emersonian idea that the divine exists in every person, and that religion is realized in action and experience, not theological verities. These beliefs would eventually draw him—as they did Emerson—away from the formal ministry into Quakerism, nonconformity, and mysticism. They would also draw him to pragmatism, a philosophy developed by Emerson’s godson, William James, which held that individual self-realization and democratic practice were inseparable.
Indeed, one of the arguments of this book is that Muste must be placed in the tradition of religious humanism associated with figures like Emerson and William James. Emerson, and transcendentalism more broadly, ‘‘insists, first, that the well-being of the individual—of all the individuals—is the basic purpose and ultimate justification for all social organizations and second that autonomous individuals cannot exist apart from others.’’ By making the individual and his or her soul central to the modern project, transcendentalism offers an alternative to ‘‘utilitarian liberalism,’’ on the one hand, and to ‘‘leader worship’’ and ‘‘collectivism,’’ on the other. ‘‘It is the ambition, if it has not yet been the fate,’’ writes one of Emerson’s most notable biographers, ‘‘of transcendentalism to provide a soul for modern liberalism and thereby to enlarge the possibilities of modern life.’’ This idea constitutes ‘‘the central truth of religious—not secular—humanism, the idea that is also the foundation of democratic individualism.’’ Certainly, as we shall see, it was Muste’s ‘‘central truth,’’ providing form to the many twists and turns of his long public career.48
Muste’s rhetorical facility was not only fostered by public school, but also by the church, which was at the center of the family’s cultural life.49 When his family entered the church on Sunday mornings, Muste felt as though he had ‘‘entered another world, the ‘real’ world . . . ‘to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.’ ’’50 Years of Sunday school taught him to sermonize and, at age eleven, he gave his first sermon on the meaning of Christmas; the following year he discoursed on ‘‘Jesus, as Prophet, Priest and King.’’ There was never a moment of doubt that he was destined for the ministry. In fact, there was no real choice in the matter; as the eldest son, his family and community expected that he would honor them by becoming a minister. But Muste’s sense of destiny for the ministry also reflected his religious sensibility. At the age of thirteen, he had a mystical experience in which he was overcome by a sense of wonder and divine presence. ‘‘Suddenly,’’ Muste recalled of this moment, ‘‘the world took on a new brightness and beauty; the words, ‘Christ is risen indeed,’ spoke themselves in me; and from that day God was real to me.’’ Soon thereafter, he received confirmation, whereas most were not confirmed until age eighteen. In later years, he would come to see his youthful mysticism as a nascent expression of pacifism.51
Having displayed his oratorical talents and religious sophistication, Muste was given a scholarship to attend the preparatory academy attached to Hope College, an RCA denominational college located in Holland, a small, largely Dutch community about twenty-five miles west of Grand Rapids. Hope offered Muste a safe,