upon the flourishes of a nineteenth-century rhetorical style.63
As Muste neared graduation, he began to chafe under the cultural and intellectual limitations of his milieu.64 As the new editor of the Anchor, he called for more intercourse with other schools and for the paper to serve as ‘‘the voice of the studentry [sic] in earnest criticism and sincere demand for reform.’’65 His valedictory speech, entitled ‘‘The Problem of Discontent,’’ provides further evidence for his growing restlessness. The speech is a classic statement of Social Darwinism, with its themes of race progress and civilization, struggle and conflict. But, perhaps revealingly, Muste compares the drama of historical progress to the individual, who is filled with doubt, dissatisfaction, and impatience, particularly ‘‘in matters of religion.’’ ‘‘What is the solution of this problem of unrest? Why this eternal restlessness? Where is surcease from sorrow?’’ Just as with civilizations, the answer was a ‘‘life of action and of usefulness’’ that builds character and brings the individual closer to God. ‘‘The god of philosophy is an abstraction. The God of experience is personality, power, and love.’’66
It is difficult to discern a budding pacifist in martial texts such as these, but one can detect a nascent reformer. Muste had clearly begun to question ‘‘his early faith,’’ a drama that would eventually inform his interest in modern theology. He had also imbibed the culture of muscular Christianity, a seedbed both of empire and of reform. Like so many Protestants of his generation, he associated the religious life with engagement, rather than retreat; he was open to the outside world and what it had to offer. His identification with Lincoln and Emerson may have further nurtured a penchant for reform; Lincoln was for him the ‘‘great emancipator,’’ while Emerson gave a noble purpose to the realization of self. In the right context, moreover, there were elements within the Calvinist worldview that could encourage a stance critical of the United States and its institutions. Calvinist anti-individualism and ambivalence toward American culture might lead to a sympathy toward labor and collective action and to criticism of the industrial order. Calvinist suspicion of the modern state might lead to support for civil liberties and an expansive, democratic society.
Finally, as much as Muste embraced the conservative ideology of Social Darwinism, he was decidedly working class at a time of great industrial unrest. The turn-of-the-century United States was rife with class conflict, competing political ideologies and worldviews that sometimes even made their way into Grand Rapids. Temperance and suffrage campaigns shook up the city; eastern and southern European immigrants brought traditions of labor radicalism to the furniture industry, leading to efforts at unionization that culminated in the Great Furniture Strike of 1911, which ended in defeat for unskilled and semiskilled factory workers like Martin Muste.67 With his working-class background, immense thirst for experience, and enormous intellectual talents, it is hard to imagine that A. J. Muste could avoid being shaken by his 1906 move to the New York metropolitan area, alive with cultural and political ferment and change.
But in 1905, on the eve of his graduation from college, Muste was a fairly conventional, conservative young American man. Despite his status as an immigrant and the son of a factory worker, he was a nationalist, imbued with notions of American exceptionalism and mission. In conformity with the expectations of his parents and his community, he was eager to attend the New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey and become an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America. His romance with a Dutch Reformed minister’s pretty daughter, Anne Huizenga, further promised upward mobility. As we shall see, these ambitions would be amply rewarded, and yet Muste would eventually risk it all for pacifism, civil liberties, and socialism.
CHAPTER 2
Spirituality and Modernity
And now in this new power of the Spirit they began to consider the grievous state of the world and the multitude of evils therein.
Many things were natural and possible to them now which had seemed impossible so long as fear and hate and mistrust ruled their hearts.
They planned for a world in which righteousness should reign supreme.
They saw that the way of love was the sure and only way to bring good to pass on earth, and that ever the Son of Man if lifted up would draw all to himself.
—A. J. Muste, 1918
WHEN MUSTE GRADUATED from Hope College, he had a choice of attending either Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, or New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey. The choice, as Muste understood it at the time, was between the ‘‘restricted life’’ of the Dutch ethnic community and the metropolitan possibilities of the broader United States. He had ‘‘come to feel’’ that his ‘‘future was in the English speaking community, part of the United States, and not in the Dutch community of the [Midwest]. In that sense very definitely I wanted to get away.’’1 The decision also reflected his craving for intellectual stimulation and rigor. He was to be sorely disappointed by the education offered at New Brunswick, but the institution’s mediocrity pushed him to explore the dynamic intellectual and cultural world of New York City. There, he was introduced to modern trends in philosophy and religion that would serve as the fulcrum for his break from Calvinism, the crux of Dutch American identity and ethnicity, and his embrace of the Social Gospel.
The liberal religion that Muste would eventually adopt has received bad press ever since the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr began his sustained attack on it as having a simplistic and naive understanding of human nature and society. Critics have further charged that the liberal emphasis on self-cultivation and self-affirmation led to the therapeutic, privatized, and individualist culture of the twentieth century.2 Yet the development of American spirituality also led to social commitment; it was, Leigh Eric Schmidt argues, ‘‘inextricably tied to the rise and flourishing of liberal progressivism and a religious left.’’ Moreover, far from being naively optimistic, liberals confronted the most perplexing questions raised by modernity, in the process experiencing its ‘‘hazards of alienation, lost identity, and nihilism.’’ Their turn inward was ‘‘a cosmopolitan quest’’ to transform the alienation and anomie of modernity for the good of individual and social life.3
Muste’s career exemplifies the connections between spiritual seeking, cosmopolitanism, and political engagement. After graduating from Hope College in 1906, he gradually became alienated from the institutional church and pietistic notions of salvation, an estrangement that led to despair and ultimately renewal through a mystical experience. From then on, he viewed the life of Jesus and its central themes of love and self-sacrifice as the true essence of Christianity. This view propelled him beyond the institutional church where he found fellowship within mainline Anglo-American Protestantism, with its ethos of spirituality, antimilitarism, and social reform. Muste had scarcely found himself in the American tradition of nonconformity when the United States declared war upon Germany. With war mobilization and conscription in full force, the meaning of American citizenship changed, demanding that the obligation to the nation supersede the religious, civic, and voluntary associations that had organized American public life in the nineteenth century.4 Muste would ultimately choose God over country, in the process forging an alternative identity and solidarity as a radical Christian pacifist.
BEFORE moving to New Jersey to attend seminary, Muste spent a year teaching English literature and Greek at the Northwestern Classical Academy of the Dutch Reformed Church in Orange City, Iowa. The ‘‘city boy’’ felt out of place in Orange City. But the town’s proximity to Anne Huizenga, who lived with her family twenty miles away near Rock Valley, in northwestern Iowa, made it worthwhile. Muste and Anne had become engaged during his final year at Hope College. For him, it had been love at first sight. ‘‘It took a little longer in her
