Muste, A. J.

MUSTE, A. J. (1885–1967). A leader of the labor Left of the late 1920s and early 1930s, A. J. Muste also assumed a key role in the pacifist Left of the 1940s–1960s. Uniquely for a major figure of the contentious twentieth-century American Left, Muste was highly regarded by many outside his own circle, in large part because of his unique personality and his approach to coalitions. As his co-worker Sidney Lens recounted, Muste “never—absolutely never—deliberately denigrated another person.... He argued with political adversaries ranging from traditional conservatives to Stalinists, but no one ever walked away from such an ‘argument’ feeling hurt or demeaned.” Muste was also one of a very few radicals of his era whose long career included neither a pro-Soviet nor a Cold War anticommunist phase.

Born Abraham Johannes Muste in the Netherlands and brought to the United States as a child, Muste grew up in what he later called an “exceedingly orthodox” Calvinist milieu in western Michigan. Though he labored in a furniture factory alongside his father as a child, Muste trained for the Dutch Reformed ministry. A second divinity course at Union Theological Seminary in New York exposed him to the Social Gospel and to a group of classmates and future co-workers including William Fincke, John Nevin Sayre, and Norman Thomas. Though Muste was the only one of the four from a working-class and immigrant background, all were gifted seminarians drawn to urban parish work and soon after to the anti-war Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). For Muste as for Norman Thomas, opposition to the First World War ended his career as a pastor and opened new vistas.

Muste’s relatively short but noteworthy years in the labor movement began with his leadership of the sixteen-week Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike of early 1919, a victory resulting in the attainment of the forty-four-hour week for the Lawrence workers and the formation of the independent Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA). Throughout the 1920s. Muste worked to unify the small and fractious unions in the New England textile industry, including a stint in the leadership of the massive Rhode Island textile strike of 1921-22, against a return of wages and hours to pre-war status. The postwar recession ended this newest round of hopes to create a comprehensive union for textile operatives.

After two years as general secretary of the ATWA, Muste became the first chairman of the faculty at Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York, and a central figure in the flourishing workers’ education movement of the period. At Brookwood, Muste succeeded in gaining the trust of emphatically non-radical officials of the Machinists, United Textile Workers, and other unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), with great benefits to Brookwood. But when Muste began to write critiques of union-management cooperation schemes and called for more aggressive organization, the conservative AFL president William Green singled out Muste and Brookwood for censure.

Disdaining the harsh and polemical Communist denunciations of AFL “misleadership,” Muste instead worked to rally left-of-center unionists into the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), established shortly before the onset of the Great Depression. Early 1930s conditions drew Muste, like many other radical intellectuals, closer to Marxist politics and the agitation for industrial unionism. The “Musteite” following seemed to fill a gap between the sectarianism of the Communists and the bureaucratic approach of leading Socialist Party figures in the AFL. The CPLA, renamed the American Workers Party (AWP), meant to create something both successfully radical and distinctly “American,” and brought along talented young people who had studied at Brookwood or other “labor colleges” established within existing universities. The small but lively AWP provided leadership to the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, a key pre-CIO victory. Unable to secure a position for itself within the Left, however, the AWP merged with the main body of Trotskyists, and was effectively absorbed by them, retaining many AWP members but casting off whatever had been unique about them and the “labor college” milieu. Profoundly discouraged, Muste abruptly returned to pacifism in 1936.

As executive director of the FOR in the 1940s, Muste defended World War II conscientious objectors and sponsored the founding and early work of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). His most remarkable period, however, came after his retirement from the FOR in 1953. In his seventies and early eighties, Muste succeeded in legitimizing antinuclear civil disobedience, conciliating disparate Left elements, and launching a mass movement against the war in Vietnam. He himself took part in widely publicized civil-disobedience actions such as in 1959, when he “hoisted his frail frame over a four-and-one-half-foot-high fence,” in the words of Jo Ann Robinson, at Omaha’s intercontinental ballistic missile base.
In 1956–1957, Muste cofounded the anti-war monthly Liberation, which served as an important forum for radical, pacifist views and cultural expressions through the 1960s and for a few years beyond. With less success, at the beginning of the post-Stalin, post-McCarthy years, he had organized the American Forum for Socialist Education, an attempt to regroup socialists, pacifists, and dissident Communists into a newer Left. A decade later, past eighty, Muste led peace missions to South Vietnam in April 1966 and North Vietnam in January 1967.

Danielson, Leila. American Gandhi: A. J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Isserman, Maurice. If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Lens, Sidney. Unrepentant Radical: An American Activist’s Account of Five Turbulent Decades. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.

Robinson, Jo Ann O. Abraham Went Out: A Biography of A. J. Muste. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

A.J. Muste. Internet Archive. Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/muste/index.htm