American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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unknown plots. Like other recent scholars, I emphasize the centrality of religion and culture in making the modern left and in forging alternative solidarities to modern nationalism. For Muste, as for others of his generation, exposure to liberal theology and mysticism allowed him to break from the Calvinist theology and world-view in which he had been raised.11 Rather than leading to a narcissistic preoccupation with the self, as critics have charged, Muste’s liberal creed led him outward, toward engagement with modernity and reform.12 By the time the United States entered World War I, he was a committed pacifist and socialist, views that put him in conflict with the wartime state. Yet these same views also propelled him into an alternative community of radical Christian pacifists and civil libertarians. Together, in groups like the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), they helped to create the modern discourse of conscientious objection and civil liberties.13
The evolution of Muste’s activist career from Social Gospel minister to pacifist, and from pacifist to labor agitator reveals a history of collaborations between progressive labor, liberals, and the left that continues to be obscured by the ideological legacy of the Cold War. Muste and other pacifists helped to build this ‘‘liberal-left tradition’’ by forging connections to the vibrant labor movement of the World War I era.14 For example, although scholars often associate the birth of the civil liberties movement with a discourse of individual rights, Muste’s example demonstrates the pro-labor orientation of the early ACLU. In 1919, caught up in the ‘‘revolutionary ferment of the times,’’ he and other pacifists became involved in a massive strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Upon winning the dramatic and bloody strike, Muste assumed the leadership of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA), a radical union modeled after Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW). The nascent ACLU was a crucial ally in the ATWA’s organizational campaigns, particularly with the onset of the postwar Red Scare. Indeed, the modern fight for civil liberties and labor’s struggle for the right to organize evolved together quite literally in Muste’s ATWA.15
This broad alliance of pacifists, progressive unionists, and independent leftists continued into the 1920s. These were not the ‘‘tired radicals’’ of lore, but rather, like Muste, idealists who recognized that the labor movement and the left had entered a period of retrenchment.16 Many of them had been active in wartime efforts to build the Farmer-Labor Party, founded in 1919, and modeled after the British Labour Party. The postwar Red Scare led to the party’s quick demise, but remnants of this ‘‘progressive labor network’’ remained a strong minority presence and real influence in the labor movement. In the 1920s, they channeled their energies into third-party organizing, defense of political prisoners, and workers’ education.17 The workers’ education movement in particular offers a window into the rich and dynamic history of labor progressivism in the 1920s, a time usually considered one of quiescence and conservatism in American labor history.18
From 1921 through 1933, Muste was probably the most influential figure in the workers’ education movement. As head of Brookwood Labor College, the country’s only residential college for workers, he oversaw the development of the movement’s teaching philosophy, pedagogy, and curriculum, as well as its expansion to include city labor colleges throughout the country and summer schools for women workers. For Muste and other labor intellectuals, workers’ education was part of a larger effort to modernize and democratize the labor movement. They constructed a method of inquiry and working-class organization that drew upon the pragmatic method, while rejecting liberal citizenship and parliamentarianism as vehicles for social change. Their efforts disrupt the dominant historiographical narrative in which Randolph Bourne’s denunciation of John Dewey for his support for World War I serves as an epitaph, proof ‘‘that pragmatism is a philosophy of acquiescence to ‘the existing fact,’ a philosophy that must validate capitalism, accept imperialism, and repudiate socialism,’’ as James Livingston has summed it up.19
Muste and his comrades in workers’ education also developed an analysis of education and culture under capitalism that had striking parallels to Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony and culture, viewing their educational programs as counter-hegemonic institutions that would produce working-class meaning and knowledge. Their educational, cultural, and organizational experiments helped to lay the groundwork for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Popular Front of the 1930s, both of which recognized the crucial role of culture in social movement formation.20
The grouping that gave birth to and sustained workers’ educational experiments like Brookwood was not without its tensions; there were real philosophical, class, and cultural differences between the various elements that made up the liberal left. Indeed, one reason for making Muste the center of historical inquiry is that he quite consciously embraced the dialectical interaction between the poles of realism and idealism, liberalism and collectivism, that have been a source of creativity and contestation in American liberal-left politics throughout the twentieth century.
For example, pacifists tended to be strongly libertarian in contrast to their more collectivist comrades in the labor movement. Cultural differences also played a role; most pacifists were native-born Protestants from the upper and middle classes who felt uncomfortable in the diverse and contentious world of labor radicalism.21 In fact, Muste’s continued and active engagement in the labor movement was unusual for a pacifist and probably reflected his immigrant and working-class background. Also in contrast to his fellow pacifists, Muste was more of a syndicalist than a parliamentarian; he was deeply skeptical of legalistic and moralistic methods for achieving social change and instead placed his hopes in labor organization, militancy, and solidarity. With the onset of the Great Depression, these differences led to Muste’s estrangement from organized pacifism, making it difficult to group him uncritically with other Protestant pacifists of his generation.22
This question of divisions on the liberal left inevitably brings up the Communist Party’s role in the labor and political struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. For many years, the standard interpretation was that the Communists pursued a policy of ‘‘divide and conquer,’’ slavishly following the party line set down in the Soviet Union rather than responding to the American context.23 More recently, revisionists have shown that race, gender, and region inflected and mediated the Communist Party line.24 While revisionist accounts have often been persuasive, this analysis suggests a more complex history. In Brookwood’s early years, for example, the party had shown a level of toleration for Brookwood, allowing its members to attend the college and inviting Brookwood faculty to lecture at the Party’s Workers’ School. Yet in 1928, the party entered its ‘‘Third Period’’ in which Stalin ordered a dramatic reversal of the policy of ‘‘boring from within’’ and a shift to dual unionism. In making this shift, the American Communist Party became openly revolutionary, frontally attacking the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and refusing to compromise with elements it dubbed ‘‘social fascist,’’ such as Muste and Brookwood Labor College.25 As a result, Muste, along with other liberals and non-Communist leftists, increasingly found Communists impossible to work with, a sentiment that should be distinguished from ‘‘red-baiting,’’ which progressives viewed as a ‘‘bogey’’ that hindered labor’s progress.26
Despite these differences, Communists, independent leftists, progressive laborites, and religious liberals all shared ‘‘a transformative concept of social progress,’’ in the words of historian Doug Rossinow.27 Muste, for example, placed Christ in the Hebrew prophetic tradition to suggest that he was a revolutionary who stood against the church and state of his time. Like other liberal Protestants of his generation, he adopted a kind of philo-Semitism in which the Jewish view of history as a project of the human and the divine served as the basis for his radical politics. ‘‘To be religious,’’ Muste sermonized, ‘‘is to get out of Egypt into Canaan,’’ to refuse to be slaves and to seek out the promised land of milk and honey.28
Muste’s radical ideals remained deeply important to him, despite the fact that he adopted a moderate tone and practical orientation in the 1920s. As economic and political conditions changed, and as the labor movement and the far left began to publicly attack and vilify him,