American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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would tie the movement to American militarism and imperialism.43 African Americans and other marginalized groups thus appeared uniquely situated to recognize and mobilize against the contradictions of American society. Gandhi had shown, moreover, how nonviolence could be a powerful tool in confronting the problem of caste.44
Although World War II was a time of creativity and dynamism for the pacifist movement, it was also a time of marginalization and defensiveness, as pacifists’ opposition to the war brought them the enmity not only of the public, but also of longtime friends and allies. Already on the defensive since the publication of Moral Man and Immoral Society, they now faced a full-on assault. As Niebuhr powerfully argued, ‘‘Whatever may be the moral ambiguities of the so-called democratic nations . . . it is sheer moral perversity to equate the inconsistencies of a democratic civilization with the brutalities which modern tyrannical States practise. If we cannot make a distinction here, there are no historical distinctions which have any value.’’45 As a consequence, pacifism shifted from being at the center of mainline Protestantism to the margins, in the process assuming a more distinct identity of nonconformity.46
Muste’s analysis of the causes and potentially negative consequences of the war were not unfounded. Yet, as is further explored in Chapter 9 below, it lacked the nuance and complexity for which he was well known. After all, he had long held that it was morally irresponsible for pacifists to refuse to take sides in the class struggle and in the struggle against racism and Jim Crow. And later, during the Cold War, he would qualify his pacifism to accommodate liberation struggles in the global South. But, in the case of World War II, he was unequivocal in his support for neutrality legislation and his opposition to American intervention.
In part, Muste’s rigidity can be explained by his career and his biography; he had, just in the late 1930s, found his footing once again within the world of pacifism, something he would have jeopardized had he compromised his pacifism in the name of a war against fascism. But it also speaks to a stubborn optimism about human nature at the core of his pacifist faith, one that made it difficult for him to appreciate the ideological dimensions of the conflict. As Bhikhu Parekh has commented of Gandhi, Muste assumed that all human beings were essentially good and that their hearts would be moved by the power of self-suffering. ‘‘Satyagraha presupposes a sense of decency on the part of the opponent, an open society in which his brutality can be exposed, and a neutral body of opinion that can be mobilized against him. It also presupposes that the parties involved are interdependent, as otherwise non-cooperation by the victims cannot affect the vital interests of their opponents.’’ Yet the ruthless suppression of public discourse and the sanitized and hidden violence of totalitarian regimes left little room for the power of moral prophecy to have any meaningful effect on centers of power or the course of the war. Moreover, as Parekh comments, ‘‘some human beings might be profoundly distorted and beyond hope.’’47
Still, a distinction should be made between opposition to war and resistance to war. Once the United States entered the conflict, Muste urged pacifists not to ‘‘sabotage or obstruct the war measures of the government’’ and instead focus their energies upon building pacifist fellowship, protecting civil liberties and the rights of conscientious objection, and seeking ‘‘human betterment and reconciliation’’ at home, particularly by befriending interned Japanese Americans and fighting for racial equality.48 Indeed, more so than their contemporaries, pacifists acknowledged the ways in which the Allies, especially the United States, contradicted their own rhetoric. This was particularly evident in their response to the atomic bomb. As Muste asserted in his 1947 book Not by Might: Christianity, the Way to Human Decency, the specter of ‘‘total, global, atomic war’’ had rendered the just-war tradition of the Christian church obsolete.49
As Paul Boyer argues in his classic history of the atomic bomb and U.S. culture, By the Bomb’s Early Light, Muste’s ‘‘eloquent manifesto posed profound dilemmas for the non-pacifist Christian who held with the just-war tradition that some conflicts were morally justifiable, and who believed that World War II fell in this category, but who recognized that it had ended in a orgy of killing almost beyond restraint or limit.’’ Niebuhr, for example, initially agreed with the Federal Council of Churches that the surprise attacks on Hiroshima and Nagaskai were ‘‘morally indefensible,’’ but soon thereafter justified their use as having shortened the war. The public dialogue that emerged after the war about the moral, ethical, and political challenges posed by atomic weapons quickly subsided, due in large part to the emergence of the Cold War and the U.S. government’s desire to promote a positive image of the atom. The campaign for international control of atomic energy and world government also foundered in the face of worsening relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.50
The emergence of the Cold War also brought long-standing tensions between the anti-Communist and Popular Front wings of the American liberal left to the surface. Anti-Stalinists like Sidney Hook and Norman Thomas maintained that the Communist Party represented a totalitarian threat and therefore did not deserve democratic rights of free speech and free association. Similarly, Christian realists accelerated their attack on liberal Protestants who hoped for peace and reconciliation with the Soviet Union, calling them naive and irresponsible. Realism required a sharp differentiation between the sacred and profane and an acceptance that the ends could justify the means, including the reality and threat of nuclear warfare. By the end of the decade, American liberalism as a whole became more ‘‘realistic,’’ moving away from its indictment of corporate capitalism and unabashedly embracing a foreign policy bereft of Wilsonian moral idealism.51
Muste occupies a complex place in this history. On the one hand, his pacifist critique of science and technology in the atomic era called elements of the Enlightenment tradition into question. He also shared the anti-Stalinist analysis of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian regime intent on expanding its power. Moreover, many of his closest friends occupied the libertarian wing of the liberal left that was purging organizations like the ACLU of Communists.52 On the other hand, he recognized early on that a politics of anti-Communism served as a justification for an expansion of American military might and the suppression of civil liberties. As a pacifist and a devout Christian, furthermore, he was deeply troubled by the tendency of his fellow Protestants to identify the fate of Christianity with the nation-state and U.S. foreign policy. It seemed to him that the United States, like the Soviet Union, was guilty of excessive secularism and materialism, manifest most alarmingly in the twin evils of conscription and atomic weaponry.53
Muste thus explicitly shunned ‘‘realism’’ and immediate political effectiveness in favor of a long-term campaign designed to appeal to the moral conscience of his fellow Americans. While ‘‘common sense and realism’’ were important, they were not ‘‘our first and greatest need,’’ he wrote in an open letter to Niebuhr. For Christian realists to pronounce judgment and doom on Americans for their atomic hubris without also calling on them to ‘‘repent, act and so flee from that judgment’’ allowed socialists and liberals to make their peace with war. The role of a prophet was not only to invoke a realization of God’s judgment but also to offer the possibility of escape from that judgment through repentance. Instead of realism, what the world desperately needed was ‘‘faith and hope’’ that it was possible ‘‘to build a just and durable peace.’’54
Together with other radical pacifists, Muste formed the Peacemakers, a group dedicated to ‘‘holy Disobedience against the war-making and conscripting State.’’55 Reflecting their essentially Christian worldview, they believed that by taking suffering upon themselves in individual and collective acts of disobedience, they would cut through the conformist culture of the Cold War and awaken their fellow Americans to their responsibility for the atomic and international crisis. With their themes of sin and suffering, repentance and redemption, Muste and his fellow Peacemakers continued and elaborated traditions of idealism and antimilitarism into the postwar era, both of which were being abandoned by large sections of the Protestant mainline, the labor movement, and the left.56
Yet the Peacemakers ultimately proved disappointing to Muste. With the hardening of the Cold