American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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Hope offered a classical liberal education that was largely isolated from the new intellectual climate of biblical criticism and Darwinian biology. But by the turn of the century, outside currents had begun to creep in. The college created a department of physics and chemistry and a department of biological science, and the library began to accumulate a small collection of science books. Although secondary students were not allowed to read the heretical texts, Muste had access to them because of his job in the library. He also learned a new ‘‘point of view’’ from the new professor of biology Samuel O. Mast, the first and only faculty member ‘‘who was a scientist in the modern sense of the term,’’ a vocation that created some tension between him and the college administration. He forced his students, Muste among them, to perform dissections rather than read about them.53
Involvement in extracurricular activities such as the YMCA and intercollegiate athletics also exposed Muste to the outside world. When Muste first arrived at Hope, ‘‘we didn’t have any intercollegiate athletics at that point. That was considered rather unorthodox and rather wild.’’ By the time he entered his freshman year, however, the college had grudgingly admitted that physical exercise, when not taken too far, could promote ‘‘Christian character.’’54 The idea that new, muscular bodies of Christians would be better equipped to spread the gospel had already made deep inroads into mainline Protestantism, and at the turn of the century had just begun to penetrate conservative churches such as the RCA, due largely to the efforts of the YMCA. Muscular Christianity was the religious counterpart of the redefinition of American manliness associated with Theodore Roosevelt’s cult of the strenuous life. While the old model ‘‘stressed stoicism, gentility, and self-denial,’’ the new, Progressive model of American manhood stressed action and aggression, attributes intimately connected to Social Darwinist notions of civilization, progress, and race.55
Hope students, including Muste, heartily assented to these ideas. He was an active member of the campus chapter of the YMCA, helped lead the campaign for intercollegiate athletics at Hope, and, later, led the college to two state basketball championships as captain of the Flying Dutchmen.56 He also served on the editorial board of the student newspaper, the Anchor, which was suffused with the language of muscular Christianity. As one 1905 editorial, probably written by Muste, put it, ‘‘In a college such as ours where so many profess to be Christians one is apt to lose sight of the serious, strenuous side of Christianity, because there is not the incessant conflict with sin that is forced upon one when in the presence of the positive evil in the world of active life.’’57 His 1903 oratory on the Polish king John Sobieski, which won the Michigan state championship, similarly reveals a preoccupation with establishing the criteria for Christian manhood: ‘‘By what standard shall we determine a man’s greatness?’’ He concludes that what made Sobieski ‘‘the Lincoln of Poland’’ was not just his use of force, but his principled stand for ‘‘civilization’’ and Christianity against the ‘‘barbarism’’ of the Turks.58
These treatises provide us with a glimpse of the teenage Muste’s world-view. He appears fixated on the question of how to be both manly and Christian. Over and over again, he argues that the man of words can be a hero so long as he exhibits character traits like courage, sincerity, and a willingness to take action and struggle. Like his heroes John Sobieski and Abraham Lincoln, he pines for an ‘‘important mission’’ that will inspire him ‘‘to conquer and to die on humanity’s behalf.’’59 These gendered concerns have a weighty quality to them; his writing is heavy with the nineteenth-century style in which Greek mythology and history, scripture, Victorian sentimentalism, and notions of Western progress and civilization blend together in ways that appear self-important to twenty-first-century eyes. Still, a softer side to Muste occasionally makes an appearance, like an Emersonian ode to nature’s beauty and another on the importance of honoring poets, not just warriors and statesmen.60
FIGURE 1. A. J. Muste (holding ball) as captain of the Flying Dutchman basketball team. 1904–5. (Joint Archives of Holland)
FIGURE 2. A portrait of the Muste family a year before Martin Jr.’s death from bronchitis. Front row, left to right: Martin Muste, Martin Jr., and Adriana Muste. Back row, left to right: Cornelia, A. J., Nellie, Cornelius, and Minnie. Circa 1906. (Marian Johnson)
Meanwhile, back at home, life continued as usual. The Mustes attended the same church and lived in the same neighborhood, Martin continued to work in the furniture industry, and Adriana continued to keep house and raise children, including a third son, Martin Jr., who was born in 1902 (and who would die of bronchitis in 1907, when he was four years old).61 Martin and Adriana were proud of their eldest son; after all, ‘‘the height of a parent’s ambition in that environment [was] that the older son should get an education,’’ especially if he planned to enter the ministry. But they expressed this pride with characteristic modesty and ‘‘matter-of-factness.’’62 According to friends, family, and acquaintances, Muste shared his parents’ humble and unassuming character, which seems to contradict the confident and masculine image of him that emerges from his college days, suggesting that we must be cautious about drawing neat conclusions based upon the flourishes of a nineteenth-century rhetorical style.63
As Muste neared graduation, he began to chafe under the cultural and intellectual limitations of his milieu.64 As the new editor of the Anchor, he called for more intercourse with other schools and for the paper to serve as ‘‘the voice of the studentry [sic] in earnest criticism and sincere demand for reform.’’65 His valedictory speech, entitled ‘‘The Problem of Discontent,’’ provides further evidence for his growing restlessness. The speech is a classic statement of Social Darwinism, with its themes of race progress and civilization, struggle and conflict. But, perhaps revealingly, Muste compares the drama of historical progress to the individual, who is filled with doubt, dissatisfaction, and impatience, particularly ‘‘in matters of religion.’’ ‘‘What is the solution of this problem of unrest? Why this eternal restlessness? Where is surcease from sorrow?’’ Just as with civilizations, the answer was a ‘‘life of action and of usefulness’’ that builds character and brings the individual closer to God. ‘‘The god of philosophy is an abstraction. The God of experience is personality, power, and love.’’66
It is difficult to discern a budding pacifist in martial texts such as these, but one can detect a nascent reformer. Muste had clearly begun to question ‘‘his early faith,’’ a drama that would eventually inform his interest in modern theology. He had also imbibed the culture of muscular Christianity, a seedbed both of empire and of reform. Like so many Protestants of his generation, he associated the religious life with engagement, rather than retreat; he was open to the outside world and what it had to offer. His identification with Lincoln and Emerson may have further nurtured a penchant for reform; Lincoln was for him the ‘‘great emancipator,’’ while Emerson gave a noble purpose to the realization of self. In the right context, moreover, there were elements within the Calvinist worldview that could encourage a stance critical of the United States and its institutions. Calvinist anti-individualism and ambivalence toward American culture might lead to a sympathy toward labor and collective action and to criticism of the industrial order. Calvinist suspicion of the modern state might lead to support for civil liberties and an expansive, democratic society.
Finally, as much as Muste embraced the conservative ideology of Social Darwinism, he was decidedly working class at a time of great industrial unrest. The turn-of-the-century United States was rife with class conflict, competing political ideologies and worldviews that sometimes even made their way into Grand Rapids. Temperance and suffrage campaigns shook up the city; eastern and southern European immigrants brought traditions of labor radicalism to the furniture industry, leading to efforts at unionization that culminated in the Great Furniture Strike of 1911, which ended in defeat for unskilled and semiskilled factory workers like Martin Muste.67 With his working-class background,