An underground tradition: Reflections on teaching the history of nonviolent thought and action

The Progressive, April 1995

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 direct-action 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 penchant for off-the-wall remarks. (Actually, Dibble is a closer, but I never stand between a student and an analogy.) “He does all the crucial work, but rarely figures in the decision.”

The comments provoked an intense debate on the role of power in the writing of history. From that point on, the entire feel of the course changed, as the students sought to understand the role of the underground tradition of nonviolence in American history and the ways the cultural arbiters have minimized the significance of that tradition.

Teaching the history of American nonviolence not only provides a way to introduce students to an alternative tradition, but also offers a way to study the process by which history is written. As my students grasped, someone of Muste’s significance could only be consigned to obscurity if he offended whatever powerful interests underlay the dominant vision of history.

I had introduced the course by discussing Randolph Bourne’s essay “The State,” which draws a distinction between the concepts of “country” and “state.” “Country,” Bourne argued, is essentially noncompetitive, referring to the geographic region and culture of a nation. The “state,” on the other hand, is an almost mystical concept of the country acting in concert as a political unit to serve some larger purpose. This ideal is achieved most commonly in wartime, with its emphasis on loyalty, sacrifice, and patriotism. In Bourne’s classic aphorism, “War is the health of the state.” Since most historians are content to trace the development of the state, it is natural that peace advocates—who, by definition, stand in opposition to the impulses of the state—should be left out.

The American tradition of nonviolence has been consistently ridiculed and marginalized by those with a vested interest in the status quo. Even the nonviolent activists who make it into the official canon do so in a distorted way. Thus my students knew Thoreau as an eccentric, antisocial crank rather than as someone intimately involved in the political issues of his day. They had studied Jane Addams as a founder of modern social work, but never as one who risked her career and reputation with her opposition to World War I. And they had learned of King as a “dreamer” rather than as a savvy politician with a radical economic critique of American capitalism.

Students also came to see that nonviolence is not a static concept. World War II has for so long been taught as an unambiguous struggle between good and evil that the students were astonished to learn that anyone could have opposed it. But World War II proved a major turning point for advocates of nonviolence, as they came to understand that traditional pacifist theory was insufficient to explain either the rise of Nazism or the economic, political, and social impulses toward war in the United States. Inspired by the successes of Gandhi in the Indian independence movement, American activists began rethinking the goals and strategies of nonviolence, increasingly experimenting with direct-action tactics.

Teaching the nonviolent tradition allows us to reconstruct the social and political contexts in which these people worked and trace the twisted skeins of intellectual influence. It demonstrates that, as the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin said, “Nothing is absolutely dead; every meaning will have its homecoming festival.” American abolitionists like Thoreau and Adin Ballou influenced Gandhi, who then influenced black American civil rights activists like Benjamin Mays, who was King’s teacher at Morehouse College.

As one student commented at the end of the semester, “I learned that the tradition of nonviolence is strong, but that it will only remain strong if each generation is committed to not letting it die.”