Muste, A. J. (1885–1967)

Abraham Johannes (A. J.) Muste is best known for his role in the labor and left-wing movements of the 1920s and 1930s and for his leadership of the American peace movement from 1941 until his death in 1967. He also had considerable influence on the African American civil rights movement and was an outspoken critic of Christian neo-orthodoxy in liberal Protestantism after World War II.

Muste was born on January 8, 1885, in the Dutch province of Zeeland. When he was 6 years old, his family immigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where his father worked at a factory. In 1909, after being ordained in the Dutch Reformed Church, he married Anna Huizenga, with whom he would have three children. The couple moved to New York City, where Muste was introduced to liberal theology and pragmatism. He became a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and joined the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. When the United States entered World War I, Muste was forced to resign his pastorate and, from then on, his spiritual home would be on the political left rather than in the church.

During the interwar years, Muste was a prominent figure in the progressive wing of the labor movement. He led striking textile workers in Lawrence, [Page 998]Massachusetts, in 1919 and served as general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America. From 1921 to 1933, he served as the director of Brookwood Labor College, a training school for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1928, after he was accused of being a communist by the American Federation of Labor, he founded the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) to agitate for militant industrial unionism. In 1933, the CPLA became the American Workers' Party (AWP), which led a number of important strikes and organized the National Unemployment League. In 1935, the AWP merged with the Trotskyists to become the Workers' Party USA, with Muste as national secretary.

In 1936, Muste had a religious experience that convinced him to break with Marxist-Leninism and rededicate himself to Christian pacifism. After briefly serving as minister of Labor Temple in New York City, he became national secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, from which he published his book, Nonviolence in an Aggressive World (1940), and trained a generation of activists in nonviolent direct action against racial segregation. When the civil rights movement emerged in the 1950s, he served as an adviser to Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others.

The issue that most preoccupied Muste during the postwar years was American militarism and the Cold War. In 1947, he published Not by Might, a book that called for draft resistance and nonpayment of taxes. In 1948, he became chairman of the Peacemakers, a radical pacifist group, and, in 1957, he helped to found the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which opposed nuclear proliferation through dramatic civil disobedience campaigns. During these years, Muste also attempted to build a nonsectarian New Left as coeditor of Liberation magazine and offered theological critiques of Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists who supported the Cold War. Muste's commitment to direct action and opposition to the Vietnam War endeared him to the New Left, who joined him in organizing the coalition that later became known as the Spring Mobilization against the War in Vietnam (MOBE). Muste was chairman of MOBE until he died on February 10, 1967, three weeks after a taxing journey to North Vietnam to bring a message of peace to the Vietnamese people.

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