who lived in the neighborhood were unskilled laborers who hailed from Zeeland. There were also Dutch grocers and butchers and shoe stores and clothing stores. The church the Mustes attended held services in Dutch, and Muste attended a Dutch parochial school.36
It would be a mistake, however, to characterize the Dutch American community and particularly the Mustes as thoroughly isolated and remote from the dominant culture. Soon after they arrived, Adriana and Martin decided to join the RCA and not the CRC, despite the fact that several of the Jonker brothers held prominent positions within the latter church. While it is difficult to know the precise reasons for the Mustes’ decision, the implications cannot be exaggerated; even though the RCA was theologically orthodox, it was more open to the dominant culture and affiliated with the established and substantial Reformed community on the East Coast, where Muste would later attend seminary and ultimately break with Calvinism. After Muste had attended two years of parochial school, Adriana and Martin also decided to send him and his siblings to public school. Moreover, the neighborhood in which the Mustes lived was more heterogeneous than other Dutch neighborhoods. ‘‘We had . . . the impression that these Americans were likely not as orthodox as [us] and that some of their behavior was questionable behavior,’’ Muste recalled, but ultimately the walls between them were ‘‘very thin.’’37
Martin Muste’s work also brought him in contact with Americans and other nationalities. The furniture industry dominated the city’s manufacturing sector and the working-class neighborhood in which the Mustes lived. Down the street and across the railroad tracks were a slew of furniture factories that provided work for an estimated one-third of the city’s laborers. Native-born workers provided the skilled labor, while Dutch immigrants, along with a growing number of Poles, provided the semiskilled and unskilled labor. Working conditions were dangerous, hours were long, and child labor was not uncommon.38 Still, ‘‘impersonality’’ had not yet appeared; Muste recalled of his summers working as a teenager that ‘‘the speed up . . . is much greater now than it was then. The factories I worked in were always comparatively small ones. Everybody knew everybody else. They were neighbors and it was pleasant to spend the time with them.’’39
The class culture of the furniture industry was a paternalistic one. Management was vociferously antiunion; it formed an employers’ association with detailed records about each worker’s wages, productivity, and union sympathies to which banks had access.40 Much to the dismay of union organizers, Dutch immigrants, including Martin, were largely hostile to unionism, and the mass of the industry’s laborers remained unorganized until the 1930s. As Muste recalled, ‘‘there was a general attitude in the Dutch churches that labor was associated with socialism and not a thing for Christian people.’’41 The strong presence of the conservative Dutch and the dominance of the furniture industry meant that Grand Rapids was known for many years as an ‘‘open-shop’’ town. Still, there was a residual labor culture; the Knights of Labor had been strong in the city until 1886, and skilled workers like the Woodcarvers and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners were active in the Trades and Labor Council, which organized a Labor Day parade every year that brought the Mustes and other residents out in droves.42
Muste’s childhood in Grand Rapids revolved around neighborhood, school, and church. The Mustes, who now had a fifth child, Willemina, lived in a small, drab house that belonged to the owners of the Quimby furniture factory. Next to the house was the lumberyard, where the Muste children played hide-and-seek; to the west was the Quimby lumber mill where Martin worked; and directly across the street was the ‘‘big house,’’ where the Quimby family lived. Muste frequently played with Irving Quimby, who was about the same age, despite Adriana’s fears that Martin would be fired for the presumption. Irving introduced Muste to the Quimby family library where, ‘‘breathlessly,’’ Muste read bound volumes of Harper’s and Century, which had been running series of articles on the Civil War that filled his head with romantic accounts of battles, marches, and sieges. Veterans who lived nearby at the Old Soldiers Home enthralled Muste as they tramped by on their way downtown, where—he later learned—they bought booze. Occasionally he managed to get one of them to talk. ‘‘What a day that was!’’43
School was for Muste an ‘‘utter fascination.’’ From the time he started he was the best speller and reader in the class. ‘‘School never started too early in the morning for my taste. The school day always seemed to rush by. The start of vacation was in its way an occasion, but the opening day of school after Labor Day was a much more joyful and momentous one.’’ There, his budding identity as an American was imbued with the missionary nationalism that was characteristic of nineteenth-century political culture. As Muste recalled of the ideological milieu in which he was raised, ‘‘Americans thought of themselves as the chosen people who were to bring the blessings of Christianity, democracy, prosperity and peace to all mankind.’’ ‘‘The Civil War had, of course, been a traumatic experience. . . . By the eighteen-nineties, however, the image that was communicated to us in the schools . . . [was that] God, in his inscrutable Providence, had inflicted upon us the tragedy of the war experience. The nation, North and South, had been crucified on the Cross of War. Did not the Bible teach that ‘without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin’?’’ Now, however, ‘‘the union was indissoluble.’’44
Impressed by the Dutch boy’s intellectual abilities, Muste’s teachers took a special interest in him. In eighth grade, the principal of his school encouraged him to write an essay on child labor for an annual contest sponsored by the Trades and Labor Council that he won. It is tempting to interpret Muste’s denunciation of child labor as growing out of his own experience, since, starting at age eleven, he spent his summers laboring with his father at the factory, but the principal furnished him with the research he used to write the essay. But it does tell us something about the twelve-year-old boy’s worldview. The essay, which reads like a sermon, begins by suggesting in Social Darwinist fashion that child labor ‘‘is the result of the brute nature in man; of the oppression of the weak by the strong.’’ It then provides a subtle yet ultimately conservative class analysis: ‘‘the rich oppressed the poor and made the children work,’’ which resulted in the emasculation of the male breadwinner, who becomes a loafer, ‘‘blaming the capitalists and the government,’’ while the mother nags incessantly. Fortunately for the American people, child labor was not as widespread in the United States as it was in England. The essay concludes didactically, with an appeal to follow the golden rule.45
Muste’s prize for winning the contest was $15 worth of books and publication of the essay in the Labor Day souvenir book, ‘‘one of the great experiences in my life.’’ Several of the books he chose indelibly shaped his character. An anthology of poems ‘‘helped develop a love for poetry which has been one of life’s greatest and most enduring joys’’; J. B. Green’s History of England fostered a lifelong interest in history; and, finally, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays had a ‘‘seminal influence. . . . With Lincoln, Emerson was a creator of that ‘American-Dream,’ which, along with the great passages of the Hebrew-Christian Scriptures, molded and nourished my mind and spirit.’’46
Muste’s reference to Emerson shows how public education exposed him to alternative worldviews. In contrast to the corporatist, determinist, and antiliberal thrust of the Reformed Church, Emerson preached a more modern creed of ‘‘self-reliance,’’ of the divinity within each person and of the self’s capacity for ‘‘an original relation to the universe.’’ His question was not ‘‘What can I know?’’ but ‘‘how can I live?’’47 Muste the prepubescent boy was hardly aware of the tensions between transcendentalism and Calvinism, but he was strongly influenced by the Emersonian idea that the divine exists in every person, and that religion is realized in action and experience, not theological verities. These beliefs would eventually draw him—as they did Emerson—away from the formal ministry into Quakerism, nonconformity, and mysticism. They would also draw him to pragmatism, a philosophy developed by Emerson’s godson, William James, which held that individual self-realization
