An underground tradition.

• Author: Cochran, David
• Position: A.J. Muste's role in the history of American nonviolence - Column

Like Woody Allen's Zelig, A.J. Muste kept showing up in important historical photographs, yet no one could identify him.

I was teaching a course in the peace-studies program at the University of Missouri titled "The American Tradition of Nonviolence," and I had just spent several weeks detailing the buried history of American war resisters and nonviolent activists.

The students were engaged in passionate discussions of such topics as the experience of Quakers in colonial Pennsylvania, the development of nonresistance and abolitionism in the Nineteenth Century, and the widespread opposition to World War I. They had read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland and struggled with Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness and the concept of the "seamless garment." Midway through the course, they'd gained a great deal of information left out of standard history texts, but the main point continued to elude most of them.

Then I gave a lecture on Muste, discussing how he had been forced to resign his post as pastor of a church in Newtonville, Massachusetts, because of his opposition to World War I. I sketched his important role in the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s when, before the rise of the CIO, militant industrial unionism had been labeled "Musteism," his brief career as a Trotskyist, his reconversion to Christian pacifism, and his subsequent work for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he helped found the Congress of Racial Equality.

I detailed the central role he played in the Americanization of Gandhian directaction tactics and the emergence of the civil-rights, antinuclear, and anti-Vietnam War movements. I discussed his co-founding of the journal Liberation, whose non-doctrinaire radicalism would be a significant intellectual influence on the rise of the New Left of the 1960s. Finally, I mentioned how Muste had spoken in 1949 at Crozer Theological Seminary, leaving a lasting impression on the young seminarian Martin Luther King Jr., and how King would later write Muste, "You have been a great friend and inspiration to me and the whole nonviolent movement."

Finishing the lecture, I could tell the students were agitated, but I had no idea why. Finally, one said, "I'm from a labor background and I can't understand why I've never heard of this guy." Another, active in environmental politics, expressed his amazement that he had never heard of Muste, either. "He's like Rob Dibble, the Cincinnati Reds' middle reliever," said one student with a...