Evans described him in the winter of 1918–19, ‘‘His face had the inner glow of one fed by spiritual manna.’’105
Evans went on to comment that she ‘‘feared that he and his wife and perhaps even their little children went hungry. However, he made no complaint.’’106 As this comment suggests, for Muste, the transition from upstanding, respectable minister to impoverished radial agitator was eased by the peace of mind that came from following his conscience and from joining a community of shared believers. The same could not be said for Anne Muste, who did not have ‘‘the release of being true to convictions’’ that he had experienced. ‘‘I was imposing a situation on her. What could she do about it?’’ he commented rhetorically, revealing the gender privilege upon which their marriage was based. Indeed, for Anne, the experience involved a loss of community and identity. As Muste noted in his memoir, she was more of ‘‘a social being’’ than he was, ‘‘got more out of the ordinary amenities of life’’ that came with being the wife of a minister. In Newton, the young mother had enjoyed shaded streets, parks and playgrounds, and the support network provided by the Women’s Association of the Central Congregational Church. It was therefore a struggle for her to understand her husband’s decisions and to reconcile herself to their consequences. ‘‘One night [during this period] as we were in bed and were talking things over,’’ Muste recalled, ‘‘she said ‘If you’ll just keep on talking to me as to why you think these things and why you think you have to do them, it will be all right.’ ’’107
By the end of 1918, the Comradeship had drafted a proposal outlining the ideas that had come out of their meetings. As Muste wrote to the FOR, they would form a ‘‘preaching order,’’ a lay group of men and women who felt ‘‘the call’’ to ‘‘rebuke’’ the old order and ‘‘enter upon the new.’’ Members would live simply, share a common fund, submit to a shared ‘‘spiritual discipline,’’ and perhaps even have a ‘‘form of dress peculiar to the order.’’ Through their personal example, as well as through proselytizing, pamphleteering, and going to jail for their beliefs, they would explain ‘‘the facts as to the present order—extremes of wealth and poverty, unearned income, undemocratic control of industry, lack of the right spirit in international relations’’ and the need for ‘‘a radically new order’’ based on ‘‘the principles of Jesus.’’ They hoped that their message would persuade the ‘‘possessing and educated classes’’ to similarly ‘‘renounce the existing order’’ and support the working class in their struggle for economic justice. Among the workers, they hoped to inculcate the ‘‘healthy and divine discontent’’ that came from envisioning a cooperative commonwealth and recognizing the ‘‘futility of violence and the [more promising] way of reason and love.’’ The early Christians clearly served as a model for the Comradeship; just as Paul ‘‘had to cut away from old Jewish associations, in order to fulfill [the Christian] mission,’’ so too would they work independently of the organized churches and identify themselves with the impoverished and needy.108
Significantly, unlike other utopian movements inspired by the vision of ‘‘bringing the Kingdom,’’ the Comradeship did not seek to separate itself from the larger society. There was some discussion of forming an economic cooperative in the country, but only as a base of support and renewal for the preaching order as it brought its message to the masses. Indeed, even as a conservative young college student, Muste had held that character and faith were built through engagement and action, not asceticism and social withdrawal. ‘‘I have a deep-seated conviction that the aim and the essence of life is love,’’ Muste explained in 1957. ‘‘And love is in its inmost nature an affirmation, not a negation; an embracing and being embraced, not rejection and withdrawal.’’109
In 1918, of course, Muste was still a political novitiate and his thinking on such questions was not fully developed. But, precisely at the moment he and his comrades drafted their proposal, a dramatic textile strike erupted in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, giving them an opportunity to translate their ideals of brotherhood and nonviolence into reality. In Lawrence, the diverse and contentious world of labor radicalism returned Muste to his working-class roots and provided him with an outlet for his idealism and his desire for a life of action, struggle, and self-sacrifice. Ironically, however, it also put distance between him and the community of Protestant liberals with whom he had found kindred spirits in Christian mysticism and pacifism.
CHAPTER 3
Pragmatism and ‘‘Transcendent Vision’’
In every movement or institution that I have ever belonged to, except the trade union movement, I have felt like a free lance, an individual who could stand over against it, so to speak, and whose main concern was to get his ideas uttered at every cost. In the trade union movement I just feel different. Of course, I do not agree with many of those who are in it . . . however . . . I cannot divorce myself from it any more than I can jump out of my own skin. No matter how much I differ from many of those prominent in the trade union movement, I want to differ with them as one who is just as much a part of that movement as they are.
—A. J. Muste, 1925
‘‘IT WAS QUITE AN EXPERIENCE,’’ Muste recalled in his memoirs, to be driven from his pulpit for holding pacifist views, but it was ‘‘nothing’’ compared to the transition from preaching at a Quaker meeting to the leadership ‘‘of a turbulent strike of 30,000 textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.’’ In the context of the postwar Red Scare, there was ‘‘no middle course’’; by supporting the strike, he had placed himself on the side of anarchy and violence not only in the eyes of the authorities, but also among many of the liberals and pacifists whom he had counted as allies and friends.1 For Muste, however, the strike was an intoxicating experience. Like so many of his generation and the next, the labor movement became his ‘‘messiah,’’ destined by history to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth. Indeed, one can make too much of the religious differences between Muste and the workers he organized and led. Though his idealism may have sprung from a different source, all imbibed the ferment of 1919 with a millennial urgency that spoke of the cultural contexts in which they were reared. Anthony Capraro, an anarcho-syndicalist who was one of Muste’s closest comrades during this period, wrote in the midst of the strike that the death and destruction of World War I also signaled ‘‘the birth-throes’’ of ‘‘a period of creation,’’ of ‘‘renaissance and regeneration.’’ ‘‘As the gospel of Jesus, so is the revolution,’’ he proclaimed. ‘‘It comes from the East.’’2 Sidney Hillman, Capraro’s superior in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union (ACW), offered a similar analysis at a mass meeting in 1918: the ‘‘Messiah is arriving. He may be with us any minute—one can hear the footsteps of the Deliverer—if only he listens intently. Labor will rule and the World will be free.’’3
Still, the Lawrence struggle and the subsequent challenge of organizing the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA) forced Muste, the religious idealist, to deal with practical questions. ‘‘What does one do in a strike? How do you organize relief? What about pickets? How do you start negotiations? How do you get national publicity? Where do you get milk for the hungry kids? How do you spot a labor spy? How do you start a union?’’ To answer these questions, Muste turned to the pragmatic philosophy of William James and John Dewey.4 Though often misunderstood to mean moderate or sensible, pragmatism seeks to reconcile idealism and realism by holding that ‘‘truth’’ emerges out of the dynamic interaction between the individual and the environment, theory and practice, and thus is always subject to change and revision. A distinctly modern philosophy, pragmatism did not view the decline of the self-sufficient individual of the nineteenth century as a tragedy, instead viewing ‘‘the increased interdependence and association determined by a corporate world of large-scale, even global, production’’ as
