Introduction

      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 in Liberation magazine, 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, that present was ‘‘Hiroshima; Nagasaki; Bikini; Korea; Dienbienphu; Suez; Hungary; Kenya; Algeria; South Africa; Alger Hiss; McCarthy; Oppenheimer; Japanese fishermen caught in a lethal rain; White Citizens Councils; the H-Bomb; the Intercontinental Ballistics Missile.’’ The yawning gap between the horrors of the mid-twentieth century and his childhood as a Dutch provincial seemed insuperable to him. ‘‘How far, far away is all this in years, and in more subtle and profound respects, from a little provincial city in Holland in 1885? How long the journey and to what end?’’¹

      Muste’s comments speak to his long life as a leader of social movements and as an important political, intellectual, and moral presence in American society from World War I to the mid-1960s. In this book, I offer an interpretation of his evolving thought and politics as a window into the history of the American left in the years when the United States became a modern nation and emerged as a global superpower.² I argue that Muste was a prophet; he drew upon his Christian faith and the example of the Hebrew prophetic tradition to call the American people to righteousness, to repent of their sins and build a new world where ‘‘every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none should make them afraid.’’³ His prophetic sensibility underscores the messianic dreams that animated many American radicals, both religious and secular, giving them the courage to challenge the ideological and coercive structures of power, often at considerable personal risk.⁴ Yet messianism always threatened to become megalomania; indeed, the history of American radicalism is rich with examples of individuals and movements who succumbed to delusions of grandeur to compensate for political marginality.⁵ In Muste’s case, a commitment to the pragmatic method—to grounding theory in practice and the individual in community—helped to curb his messianic impulses and allowed him to remain flexible and relevant across and throughout the political and ideological shifts of the mid-twentieth century.⁶

      Muste’s revolutionary commitment never ceased, but his confidence in the power of structural change to remake human beings and human society declined over time. Like others who came of age in the 1910s, he was a modernist, convinced of the plasticity of the self and the environment.⁷ But in the 1930s and 1940s, he shared in the introspective turn of many of his comrades, questioning his assumptions about reason, history, and progress.⁸ Rather than retreat from his socialist convictions, however, he remade them for the new era of the ‘‘American Century,’’ in which organization, bureaucracy, and conformity appeared to threaten human freedom as much as class inequality and poverty had in earlier decades. The result was a new kind of ‘‘prophetic politics’’ in which action and commitment represented an effort not only to change society, but also to maintain one’s humanity against the ‘‘anti-human.’’⁹ His existential politics and style resonated deeply with the New Left, making him an ideal figure for exploring change and continuity in radical politics over the course of the twentieth century.¹⁰

      At the same time that Muste represents significant historical formations, he was unique. He occupied an anomalous place in the history of American radicalism: he was a Social Gospel minister yet he was a working-class immigrant; he was an intellectual and idealist yet he was beloved by the practical and down-to-earth workers who rallied to his vision of militant industrial unionism in the 1920s and 1930s; he was an anti-Stalinist yet he refused to condone McCarthyism and opposed the Cold War; he was the foremost theoretician of Gandhian nonviolence in the United States yet he publicly chastised the civil rights leadership for failing to respond to the challenges posed by black power and U.S. empire; he was a devout Christian yet he was held in high esteem by the Marxist, secular left; he was an Old Leftist yet he supported and celebrated the New Left.