American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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1929, an organization committed to revitalizing the American labor movement through aggressive and militant efforts to organize industrial workers and an unabashed idealism.
Historians typically associate the ‘‘Musteite’’ movement with the American Workers Party (AWP), which was founded in December 1933 only to merge with the Trotskyist Communist League of America (CLA) a year later and become the Workers Party of the United States (WPUS). Yet the movement actually began with the founding of the CPLA as a reaction to the marginalization and persecution of labor progressives within the AFL.29 As a result of the CPLA’s informal character, which was often no more than a progressive caucus within a union, the Musteites’ influence on the labor movement has not received adequate scholarly attention. Yet, as we shall see, they played a key role in jump-starting the movement for industrial unionism and were one of the main forces behind the movement of unemployed men and women in the early years of the Great Depression.30
The Musteites also made important theoretical and organizational innovations. Drawing upon their efforts in the workers’ education movement, they attempted to ‘‘Americanize’’ Marxism by placing praxis at the center of organizing and revolutionary activity. As a result, they would attract intellectuals like Sidney Hook, V. F. Calverton, and Lewis Corey who were eager to reconcile pragmatism and Marxism and to make culture a front in the struggle for a socialist society. Their theoretical framework, in other words, was not imposed from above by late-coming intellectuals, but rather had been developed by the working-class men and women who formed the shock troops of the CPLA.31 This largely unknown story of the ‘‘Musteites’’ helps fill in gaps in the history of the left and labor from 1929 through 1934 and provides a social history of the independent radicals and industrial unionists who would become the backbone of the CIO and the Popular Front.32
Ironically, just as the CIO exploded onto the scene, Muste’s own movement was on the verge of collapse. The Musteites had become more openly revolutionary over the course of the 1930s, viewing the widespread labor revolts as a sign of an imminent workers’ revolution. But it soon became apparent that the thrust of the revitalized labor movement was toward social democracy rather than communism. Muste sought to resolve this dilemma by adopting the Leninist idea of a vanguard party who would lead the masses in the revolution. In the interest of party building, he welcomed overtures from the Trotskyist CLA to merge their respective parties. But the Trotskyists did not conduct the merger in good faith; over the course of 1935, Muste watched in dismay as his most dedicated supporters left the party in disgust to serve as organizers for the CIO or to join the Communist Party, which had now entered its dynamic united front period. By early 1936, Muste’s movement was in shambles.33
Muste’s options were limited. He could have remained in the Trotskyist movement, yet that would have meant being surrounded by comrades he had come to view as petty, duplicitous, self-interested, and ruthless. He could have joined the CIO, but that would have entailed some reconciliation with his old nemesis John L. Lewis, with whom he had tangled in the civil wars that had wracked the United Mine Workers of America in the late 1920s and early 1930s.34 It also would have involved some compromise with the Democratic Party. Yet Muste firmly believed, with other Trotskyists, that President Franklin Roosevelt would take the nation into another world war, and that it would not be a war against fascism, but a war for American capitalism and imperialism. It turned out, of course, to be both a war against fascism and a war for American global hegemony, yet Muste would prove congenitally unable to make this ‘‘Faustian bargain,’’ as Nelson Lichtenstein has called the rapprochement made between socialists, the Democratic Party, and the warfare state over the course of the New Deal era.35
It was in this painful and complicated context that Muste had a mystical experience that told him to return to Christianity and pacifism. His ‘‘reconversion’’ was no doubt genuine, as it paralleled a similar moment of transcendence that he had during World War I, but it also allowed him to leave the secular left and the labor movement, where he had found himself compromised and marginalized, and to return to the Christian-pacifist community and to mainline Protestantism.
Ever the social activist, Muste derived political meaning from his mystical experience. As he explained in numerous articles, speeches, and a book entitled Non-violence in an Aggressive World, the ‘‘proletarian movement’’ had been ‘‘corrupted’’ by ‘‘the philosophy of power, the will to power, the desire to humiliate and dominate over or destroy the opponent, the acceptance of the methods of violence and deceit, the theory that ‘the end justifies the means.’ ’’ Yet once one assumes that ‘‘in some situations, you must forswear the way of love, of truth, must accept the method of domination, deceit, violence . . . there is no stopping place.’’36 His return to pacifism thus grew out of a renewed appreciation of pacifists for respecting human dignity and paying attention to means.37
Muste’s return to the church and to absolute nonviolence involved, on some level, a rejection of his pragmatism and a more unequivocal embrace of moral prophecy. Yet pragmatism would continue to shape his political character; it bequeathed him openness, flexibility, and an experimental attitude that would allow him to transcend bitter intra-left conflicts of the postwar era and to build coalitions that advanced common purposes. Moreover, he continued to view the interaction between his ideals and reality as a sort of scientific project, as a search for truth. At its most creative, this approach would help to make pacifism dynamic and innovative in the post-1941 era. At its most limited, it could lead to pure prophecy, as pacifists judged American society harshly only to withdraw from it.
Muste’s renewed appreciation for the prophetic tradition led to a very public and ongoing debate with the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his 1932 book Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr charged that liberals and pacifists were insufficiently ‘‘realistic’’ about the realities of sin and power, and called for compromise with the coercion and violence that characterized real relations between social classes and nation-states. He did not, however, condone this reality, but rather hoped that prophets (such as himself) would act as society’s conscience and curb its excesses.38 Muste sharply disagreed with this interpretation. The problem of the immorality of group behavior was indeed real, but the very ‘‘tension’’ Niebuhr and other ‘‘Christian realists’’ emphasized ‘‘exists only if the impossible demand of the Gospel is laid upon them. Otherwise . . . ‘the relationship between the Kingdom of Christ and the political sphere’ becomes ‘a tension of static parallelism’ and not ‘a tension of dynamic transformation.’ ’’ Indeed, in calling for compromise with human limitations, realists had actually renounced the prophetic tradition that they claimed was their inspiration. Without a vision and without a goal, Muste predicted, realism would serve as an apology for nationalism and war.39
Muste’s preoccupation with making pacifism politically relevant became the basis for his exploration of Gandhian nonviolence as a method for social change. When the FOR hired him as national secretary in 1940, he attempted to transform the organization into a vehicle for building a mass ‘‘nonviolent direct action Movement’’ that reached out to ‘‘oppressed and minority groups such as Negroes, share-croppers, industrial workers . . . as Gandhi did in the India National Congress.’’40 His efforts helped to lead to a renaissance in American pacifism. As one FOR staffer would recall, the era of World War II was the ‘‘golden age of the FOR.’’ The staff and the executive board were ‘‘composed of giants’’ like Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley, James Farmer, and George Houser. Muste ‘‘towered’’ over all of them.41
With Muste’s active encouragement, the main target of these early experiments with nonviolence was American race relations.42 As a labor progressive, Muste had long been a vocal opponent of racial segregation and discrimination, but he had ultimately subordinated race to class, viewing it as a problem that would be resolved with the inclusion of black workers in the labor movement. Changes in American political economy over the course of the late 1930s and into the 1940s led him to question this analysis. Although he welcomed the social legislation of the New Deal, he feared that it would lead to a rapport between labor and the Democratic Party that would compromise labor’s independence and diffuse its radical spirit. American