American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
which manifested deeply antimodern and sectarian values. Muste found the movement’s cultural politics discomfiting. While he believed in the importance of simple living, he remained a modern, delighting in the diversity, commotion, and cultural life of urban environments; he smoked and danced, and enjoyed Broadway shows, baseball, and the Marx Brothers. Indeed, parallels to Gandhi only go so far, as Muste firmly rejected asceticism and preindustrial nostalgia. ‘‘I believe men are meant to lead the ‘abundant life,’ ’’ he explained to his more abstemious comrades, ‘‘and this means physically, aesthetically, intellectually, spiritually . . . this involves variety, nonconformity, experimentation.’’57
Muste also remained a socialist, and he viewed utopian experiments as, paradoxically, expressions of individualism and anarchism. Civil liberties and decentralism were not ends in themselves, but rather part of a larger effort to democratize and demilitarize the politics of the left. If we ‘‘profess to conceive of mankind as a family which should live as a family,’’ he commented, ‘‘then our only valid objective is the transformation of society, not the building of a shelter for the saints or a secular elite within a corrupt social order, which in effect is assumed to be beyond redemption.’’58
This difference between radical pacifists and their titular head remained in abeyance until the mid-1950s when world-historical events intervened and persuaded Muste that a political and ideological space had opened up for mass action. He pointed to the Montgomery bus boycott as evidence that nonviolence might appeal to large numbers of people. He also suggested that growing public concern over nuclear fallout might be directed into opposition to the arms race and American foreign policy. In addition to these fissures within domestic political culture, international developments suggested some possibility for easing the tensions between the two superpowers. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin might lead to the humanization of Soviet rule; it might, moreover, be the grounds upon which the ‘‘split between Socialists and Communists could be healed’’ and a new left reborn. The emergence of a nonaligned movement in the decolonizing world was the most promising development of all.59
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Muste sought to build a nonaligned ‘‘third way’’ and antinuclear sentiment through his leadership of and organizational efforts on behalf of the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) and the World Peace Brigade (WPB), both of which exemplified the prophetic, existential style of political activism he had pioneered in the 1940s. Their dramatic, often transnational campaigns had Muste crisscrossing the globe, engaging in dialogue and building relationships with European and Asian peace activists and clergy that would help lay the foundations for the international antinuclear movement and the revitalization of the international peace movement.60
At the same time, he took tentative steps toward rebuilding the United States’ shattered and divided left. He helped to found Liberation magazine in 1956 as a vehicle for promoting ‘‘fresh thinking,’’ and he pursued reconciliation of anti-Communist socialists and Communists through the American Forum for Socialist Education.61 The latter effort was a failure that illustrated the ways in which the question of Communism continued to divide liberals and socialists. Through Liberation, CNVA, and the civil rights movement, however, he would find that the younger generation was far more willing to move beyond the ideological divides of the Old Left and, moreover, that they shared his idealism and his flair for direct action and nonviolence.
The mid-1950s were also a time of personal change in which Muste’s assumptions about cultural norms, sexuality, and gender were challenged in a variety of ways. Muste had long had relationships of mutual respect and love with activists who were women, homosexual, and/or people of color. Yet, like others of his generation, he simply did not see the realm of family, gender, and sexuality as having political meanings. This was most apparent in his relationship with his wife, Anne (called ‘‘Anna’’ by her friends and family) whose life had been in service to making his political commitments possible. Yet her death in 1953 did not lead him to question the degree to which his public self had been dependent upon her private labor. Instead, he praised her for her ‘‘loyalty,’’ a comment that reveals his patriarchal assumptions about the proper role of women in relationship to men.62
At the same time, however, his ideas about morality and sexuality started to shift. One can see this in his evolving views of Bayard Rustin’s homosexuality, as well as his reflections upon the cultural changes that had begun to make themselves felt by the end of the 1950s. Muste never politicized sexuality or gender, but his pragmatic sensibility and commitment to nonviolence allowed him to maintain open lines of communication and productive relationships with people whose cultural and sexual identities were far more subversive than his own. Hence the seemingly paradoxical place of honor the Protestant elder occupied in the minds and hearts of bohemian nonconformists like Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and Barbara Deming.63
This was how Muste became a cultural and political icon in the 1960s. Bohemian radicals and Freudian psychoanalysts viewed him as a model of the self-actualized personality, delighting in his advocacy of authenticity, spontaneity, and love. Intellectuals dialogued with him about the problems of conformity and organization in contemporary American society, and admired his ability to take the existential leap of faith and action that eluded them. Liberal Protestants increasingly found his critique of realism persuasive, and joined him in signing petitions and marching in demonstrations against nuclear testing and the Vietnam War. Civil rights activists praised him for his pioneering efforts on behalf of nonviolence; as Martin Luther King Jr. told Muste’s biographer, the jazz critic Nat Hentoff, ‘‘The current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations field is due more to A. J. than to anyone else in the country.’’64
Pacifists, meanwhile, continued to draw strength and sustenance from what they viewed as his equanimity, expressed through joyfulness and humor, as well as his spiritual constancy and depth of vision. ‘‘We are all sons of A. J.,’’ Tom Cornell of the Catholic Worker Movement proclaimed.65 Muste was ‘‘the leader, prophet, confessor and gadfly to us all,’’ recalled Glenn Smiley.66 Without Muste’s leadership, antiwar activists concurred, the coalition against the war in Vietnam would not have been possible. Activists outside of the United States similarly recognized Muste’s centrality to struggles for peace and freedom; Indian pacifists referred to him as ‘‘the American Gandhi,’’ and when he died, telegrams streamed in from around the world, from places as diverse as Tanzania, India, North Vietnam, England, France, and Chile.67
Of course, philosophical, political, and cultural differences continued to inhibit Muste’s efforts. Many pacifists remained unwilling or unable to relate to all but true believers in nonviolence, while liberals and social democrats remained reluctant to move beyond anti-Communism and the bipolar worldview of the Cold War.68 Perhaps Muste shared some responsibility for these difficulties. After all, his political position was a fairly complex and nuanced one that was difficult to enact in practice. He called on peace activists to avoid united fronts, while keeping the lines of communication with Communists open. He called on them to be ‘‘prophets,’’ while at the same time instructing them to be ‘‘canny’’ and pragmatic. He called for an absolute commitment to nonviolence, while urging qualified support for third world revolutionaries who embraced violence. For Muste, such were the inevitable contradictions of living as a revolutionary and a pacifist in a sinful world, and he was not personally troubled by them. Yet this made for an unclear and confusing strategy for nonviolent activists to follow.69
Starting in 1964, Muste became utterly consumed with ending the war in Vietnam. ‘‘I cannot get it out of my head or my guts that Americans are away over there, not only shooting at people but dropping bombs on them, roasting them with napalm and all the rest,’’ he wrote in 1965.70 In his speeches and publications, he insisted that Vietnam was not a ‘‘mistake,’’ but rather an expression of an overall ‘‘pattern’’ in American history and foreign policy. All of us ‘‘are trapped in the heritage of the past,’’ he observed, particularly the Western heritage of equating power with the use of force and violence, and of subjugating ‘‘others’’ based on notions of racial, national, and religious superiority.