The Prophetic Pilgrim

Even now, almost 100 years after his birth, A.J. Muste's place in U.S. history is not easily pegged. Among other things Abraham Johannes Muste could be called the father of the nonviolent movement in the United States. He was involved in active non-cooperation with every American war in this century: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and all the Cold War episodes and "police actions" along the way. He also pioneered the application of Gandhian techniques of nonviolent resistance and intervention to North American social struggles ranging from a major textile strike he helped organize in 1919 to incursions onto nuclear test sites and nuclear weapons bases in the 1950s and '60s.

Muste's career could also be placed in the long American tradition of "the public preacher," the prophetic figure who fearlessly points out the nation's sins and calls the people to repentance. An ordained Christian minister most of his life, Muste most often found his pulpit in the newspapers, the airwaves, and the streets. To many Muste was the conscience of the nation during some of the nation's meanest years.

Muste could also be remembered as one of the most insightful political analysts and theologians of his time. Few Americans, for instance, saw so soon or so clearly the inherent pitfalls of the foreign policy course America charted after World War II. And while Muste's doctrinal orthodoxy was not as rigorous as many might prefer, his record of unerring vision about the contemporary relevance of the gospel of Jesus would shame many of his more orthodox (or neo-orthodox) contemporaries.

But even deeper than Muste's identity as a pioneer of nonviolence, public preacher, or political thinker lies his identification, which crops up again and again in his writings, of himself as a pilgrim. Muste considered himself one who, like his biblical namesake, leaves the security, comfort, and stagnation of familiar places and things to follow God's call into the wilderness and toward a new land, a new city, that God will build alongside his people.

From his earliest adult life to his final days, Muste's life was a pilgrimage. And in all its various parts, it was ultimately a pilgrimage toward the new land of peace, justice, and wholeness that God still promises. His was a life totally immersed in the turmoils and questions of his times. But it was also a life lived in radical opposition to the predominant current of the times. He was, in a way few Christians ever are, truly all the way "in" this world, but clearly not "of" it.

It is fitting that the first significant event of young A.J. Muste's life was a literal journey from a familiar home to a strange new land. In 1891, when Muste was 6 years old, his family left its native village of Zierikzee in the Netherlands to follow relatives to the land of opportunity, America. Immediately upon clearing immigration in New York, the Mustes took a train to join the substantial Dutch Calvinist enclave in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The young Muste picked up English very quickly and was soon a star student, winning spelling bees and, at 13, a Grand Rapids Labor Council essay contest on the evils of child labor. While Muste later recalled his parents as not being especially religious, the Michigan Dutch colony was an intensely religious environment. In any case, as an adult Muste recalled inner stirrings during his childhood that he identified as religious experiences. Given this spiritual and intellectual bent, it was no surprise when at 14 he left Grand Rapids for Hope College in Holland, Michigan, to begin preparing for the Reformed ministry.

In 1906 Muste traveled east to complete his education at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After graduating in the spring of 1909, Muste returned west, first to Iowa where he married his college sweetheart Anna Huizenga and then to Grand Rapids where he faced examination and was licensed as a minister. Back in New York that September, Muste was ordained in the Reformed Church of America and assigned to the Fort Washington congregation in upper Manhattan. As Muste recalled it, two of the best things about the church were its proximity to the New York Yankees baseball stadium and to Union Theological Seminary.

Through part-time courses at Union, Muste was exposed to the new schools of biblical criticism then emerging and to the theology of the social gospel. These intellectual explorations at first caused Muste to question his faith, but finally led him back to affirm its essential foundations with renewed commitment. He did find, however, that he could not go on "giving the impression that I accepted the literal inspiration of Scripture and the whole corpus of Calvinist dogma, at least as then interpreted." So in 1914 he left the Reformed church and accepted a Congregationalist pastorate in Newtonville, Massachusetts.

At the same time that Muste was examining the intellectual bases of his faith, he was coming to a new understanding of its implications in the world. New York City then, as now, was marked by extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty not seen in the Midwest. Through a brief stint serving a congregation on the Lower East Side, Muste gained a first-hand understanding of the grinding misery of urban poverty. Turn-of-the-century New York was also teeming with radical activists promoting various socialist and anarchist solutions to such injustices.

Muste did not join the ranks of the radicals then, but he was influenced by them. In the 1912 presidential election, for instance, Muste recalled being excited that spring by the Democratic Party's nomination of New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson. He considered Wilson a champion of peace and progressive reform. But by the time November rolled around, Muste found himself voting for Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs.

All the political currents that were feeding Muste's radicalization came to a head with the onset of World War I. The dominant mood in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had been one of unswerving optimism. But the savagery of World War I, fought over apparently petty imperial rivalries, put a dent in many grand dreams about the human future. Still, on this side of the Atlantic, the war also seemed to confirm that America was essentially different, more rational and humane, than the old superpowers of Europe. But then in 1917 President Wilson, the liberal icon, plunged America headlong into the European carnage.

The coming of war created for Muste a crisis that was first and foremost spiritual. As the United States began moving toward involvement in the conflict, Muste began examining with new intensity the biblical teachings on violence. After what he described as "months of inner wrestling," Muste concluded that he "could not 'bend' the Sermon on the Mount and the whole concept of the Cross and suffering love to accommodate participation in war." In 1916 he joined the newly formed Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and publicly identified himself as a Christian pacifist.

Obviously this decision marked a turning point in Muste's life, though at the time he could not have realized how significant it would be. While he had previously grown away from the Calvinism and Republicanism of his upbringing, Muste had, until 1916, remained very much a product of the more progressive and intellectually fashionable aspects of his times. His embrace of a thorough-going pacifism during a time of war led him outside the respectable consensus and into a stance of radical opposition. He began preaching his pacifist convictions from the pulpit and participating in anti-war demonstrations. In 1917 he finally had to leave his Newtonville pastorate when the congregation felt that his anti-war stance prevented him from giving sufficient pastoral comfort to the families of killed or wounded soldiers.

A.J., Anna, and daughter Nancy Muste then followed the well-worn path of New England dissidents to Providence, Rhode Island, where he found employment with a Quaker meeting. He began to move tentatively into anti-war work in Providence and also in Boston where he worked with the local FOR chapter and the newly founded National Civil Liberties Union (later the ACLU), which worked to guard the First Amendment rights of dissidents.

When the war ended in the fall of 1918, the Mustes moved to Boston. There they joined with two other FOR families in a venture called Fellowship House, a semi-communal home, educational center, and meeting place for religious pacifists and other radicals. A closer-knit group called The Comradeship developed out of the Fellowship House circle and began exploring ways to live out nonviolent values in daily life as well as in political action. Much of their talk centered on various ideas for an intentional community, possibly with a rural base. But later that winter, history intruded on The Comradeship and presented Muste with an unexpected new direction that would dominate his life for the next 17 years.

With the end of the war in 1918, radical labor upheavals had resumed at a fever pitch across the United States. Fired by what then seemed like the shining example of the Bolshevik revolution, general strikes took place in several U.S. cities, the most famous being in Seattle, Washington, where union workers effectively assumed control of the city for several weeks.

It was in this political atmosphere that word reached The Comradeship of an impending textile strike in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts. The United Textile Workers union in Lawrence, affiliated with the moderate American Federation of Labor (AFL), had called for a reduction of work hours from 54 to 48 per week. The mill owners responded that they would grant the request, but only with a proportionate reduction in pay. Despite the fact that most mill workers were earning less than $1,000 a year, the cautious union leaders conceded the pay cut. At this point the workers bolted from their union and went on strike with the slogan 48/54, meaning 48 hours work for 54 hours pay. More than 20,000 mill workers joined the strike.

Rejected by their union and divided into a multiplicity of ethnic groups, the workers lacked the leadership resources to maintain their struggle. Muste and other members of The Comradeship had visited the Lawrence workers at some early meetings and had promised to stay in touch and to use their Boston connections to raise money for a strike fund. But soon the Comrades found themselves pressed into service as strike organizers, with Muste asked by the workers to assume leadership of the strike.

Muste saw the strikers' invitation as "a unique opportunity to try out in the industrial realm one's moral and spiritual ideals." But it also represented another step away from the respectable mainstream of social, political, and religious life. In those days, even more than now, the "peace movement" was largely the province of the educated upper and middle classes. By joining the strikers, Muste was identifying himself with the fate of immigrant mill workers who resided very near the bottom of America's social ladder.

The strike lasted for almost four months. During that time many of the workers and organizers, including Muste, were beaten and jailed by police bent on breaking up picket lines. Finally, near the end of May, when the exhausted and hungry workers were ready to concede defeat, the mill owners came through with an offer of 55 hours pay for 48 hours work, slightly more than the strikers' initial demand.

As a result of the Lawrence strike and other similar New England uprisings, a new union, the Amalgamated Textile Workers (ATW) was formed, and A.J. Muste was elected general secretary. But the fledgling union was faced with the unremitting hostility of the AFL and, perhaps most important, a severe recession in the textile industry, beginning in 1920.

Frustrated by the ATW's lack of progress, Muste resigned his post in 1921. The union folded shortly thereafter, but Muste remained deeply committed to the struggle of labor. He soon found a way to combine that passion with the exercise of the intellectual skills acquired in his previous work as a clergyman when he became director of the newly founded Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. At Brookwood rank and file union leaders were trained, usually at the expense of their union, in disciplines ranging from basic reading and writing to literature, political philosophy, and public speaking.

During Muste's 12-year tenure at Brookwood, the institution became something of a haven for the then-besieged radical labor forces as well as a training ground for the resurgence of radical activism that was to come during the years of the Great Depression.

Not surprisingly, Brookwood found itself under constant attack from the conservative AFL leadership. Spies sent to infiltrate the school came out with lurid tales of Communist subversion that naturally received prominent attention in the press. In fact some faculty members at Brookwood, whether or not they were party members, were openly sympathetic to the Communist line. But the predominant school of thought at Brookwood, and the one Muste subscribed to, was not only resolutely anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, but also deeply suspicious of the totalitarian tendencies found in the Soviet Union and its apologist organizations in this country.

Muste's break with Brookwood College came when he became convinced of the need for a progressive labor organization to counter the reactionary policies of the AFL. That organization was founded as the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) in 1929. For the next few years, Muste continued his duties at Brookwood, using the college as the base for the CPLA. But with the beginning of the depression, as the CPLA became more radical and as Muste's involvement with it intensified, it became a source of tension between Muste and other members of the college staff. Eventually Muste tried to force a merger of Brookwood Labor College and the CPLA. Instead, in 1933 a nasty split ensued, complete with bitter recriminations on both sides. At that time Muste severed his relations with the college and became a full-time revolutionary labor activist.

In those early depression years, the CPLA, later reconstituted as the American Workers Party (AWP), became for a while one of the leading forces on the flourishing American Left. Muste's AWP engaged in a variety of scattershot agitation and organizing activities, as well as political education and ideological study. The Musteites organized Unemployed Leagues and inserted themselves, often with remarkable success, into many labor upheavals. Muste and his followers enjoyed perhaps their greatest influence in the organizing of strikes in the auto parts industry that helped lay the groundwork for the formation a few years later of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a more activist mainstream alternative to the still-stodgy AFL.

During his time as the leader of a radical left-wing party, Muste, for all practical purposes, abandoned his Christian faith and the principles of nonviolence that had their origins in the faith. He was primarily seeking a way to adapt Marxism to the American context and came to accept, and even affirm, the counterviolence of workers in conflict with the police.

Muste's initial commitment to the workers of Lawrence, Massachusetts, had been inspired by the biblical teachings of solidarity with the poor and oppressed and had been carried out as an experiment in applying nonviolence to the industrial arena. But his experience of the workers' plight and his new exposure to Marxist currents of thought convinced him, and rightly so, that the basic injustice and folly of capitalism were laying the path for economic disaster and war. He came, again with considerable justification, to see the workers' movement as the place to be to effect humane changes in the lives of the masses of people and in international affairs.

It took a rude encounter with left-sectarian hardball politics to turn Muste back toward his first sources. That encounter began in the early months of 1934 when Muste and the AWP were approached by the Communist League of America (CLA) with a proposal to merge the two organizations. The CLA was the American branch of the international Trotskyist movement, formed after the squabble over who would succeed Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union ended with Trotsky's expulsion. The AWP and CLA shared a Marxist analysis and a mutual hostility toward the Stalin-allied Communist Party and the supposedly "reactionary" Socialist Party. The CLA had also been active in the labor wars with some success, especially in organizing a major Teamsters strike in Minneapolis. The two groups officially merged in December 1934, with the new organization taking the name Workers Party of the United States.

But the Trotskyites had brought a secret agenda to the merger. From the very beginning they intended only to co-opt the Muste forces into their own strategy. Musteites were maneuvered away from positions of real power in the new party. Muste himself was made editor of the party's official journal, a position that allowed him to control the party's rhetorical tone but also allowed the Trotskyites to work around him in carrying out their schemes.

Muste finally perceived the true nature of the alliance with the Trotskyites in the summer when orders came down from Leon Trotsky himself for the Workers Party of the United States to dissolve itself and have its members infiltrate the Socialist Party and eventually take it over. Muste opposed this move because he didn't think the Socialist Party was a prize worth the effort, and also because, try as he might to be a hardnosed revolutionary, he was deeply offended by the ethics of such conspiratorial politics.

With the move into sectarian esoterica, Muste's organization fell into disarray. Grassroots organizing fell by the wayside, and the Musteite Unemployed Leagues joined with other local organizations of the unemployed that had been organized by rival Left parties. In early 1936 Muste showed up at Akron, Ohio, during an enormous rubber workers strike, but his offers of assistance were rejected by the strikers, who had grown wary of far-left machinations. In addition Muste and his family, which now included three children aged 17,11, and 6, were without any income to speak of and going into debt. Muste himself, now over 50, was exhausted by the years of interminable wrangling and infighting that comprised life on the Marxist Left. Finally in June 1936, the friends Muste had accumulated during two decades of activism rallied around and raised enough money to send A.J. and Anna Muste on a long European vacation.

Despite the disheartening experience of the last two years, Muste departed for Europe still a convinced Marxist revolutionary. One of the early stops on the Mustes' journey was a visit with Leon Trotsky himself in Norway at his home in exile. But while in Paris, Muste wandered alone into an ancient church on the Left Bank and took a seat facing the altar. As he sat in the silent church, surrounded by the Roman Catholic religious statuary that should have been anathema to a Calvinist-turned-Quaker, much more to a Marxist-Leninist, Muste reported hearing an inner voice saying, "This is where you belong, in the church, not outside it."

Immediately upon his return to the United States, Muste began reorienting his life in line with his reconversion to Christian pacifism. He renewed his membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, writing to its director John Nevin Sayre, "I am again the unequivocal Christian and pacifist I was some years ago."

In 1937 Muste found the way back into the mainstream Protestant church that he had been seeking when he was appointed director of the Presbyterian Church's Labor Temple in Lower Manhattan—an experimental parish whose mission was to serve the "unchurched masses" of the city. The Presbyterians accepted his credentials as a Congregationalist minister, and Muste was, as he put it, "back home." The years at the Labor Temple were the closest thing to a normal existence the—Mustes had known since the early days at Brookwood. Muste seemed to be settling into a dignified, if still not quite respectable last phase of his public career. But what some have called "the winds of war" would soon set the Presbyterian preacher on a new course that would be his most controversial and unpopular one yet.

In the late 1930s, as the threat of another world war became imminent, Muste intensified his anti-war organizing, speaking, and writing in an attempt to forge a pacifist movement that could prevent the war. In April 1940 Muste turned his full attention to peace work and accepted the position of executive secretary of FOR. One of his primary emphases at the Fellowship was to encourage the strengthening of community and spiritual rootedness among its members. Muste believed that such nurture and support were necessary for a peace witness to be sustained through the war years, and for "islands of safety and sanity" to emerge once the darkness had passed. He also urged FOR groups to begin making provisions to take care of each other's families in case any of their number were imprisoned.

Once the United States entered the war, much of Muste's attention became centered on the problems of conscientious objectors and draft resisters. The Selective Service Act of 1940 had provided for the consignment of religious conscientious objectors to Civilian Public Service camps. But Muste was concerned that no provision was made for non-religious objectors or for those who refused registration. Those categories of war resisters were sent to jail. Muste's very visible public support for the non-registrants was controversial. But he also worked long and hard to encourage unity and tolerance among pacifists of different convictions.

During the war Muste and FOR also protested the obliteration bombings carried out by the Allied forces over Germany and Japan. The last of those obliteration bombings, the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, created a new and unparalleled threat that would occupy much of the remainder of Muste's life. The summer of the atomic bombings, Muste had begun work on his autobiography, but he laid that project aside and wrote instead Not By Might. The book, published in 1947, put forth a Christian pacifist response to the nuclear age in political, theological, and practical terms.

Muste also seemed determined to meet the world's escalation of insanity with an escalation in his own commitment. In 1948 he became a founding member of Peacemakers, a network of nonviolent activists committed to non-registration for the draft, tax refusal, and active civil disobedience against nuclear weapons and the new "peacetime" militarism. Muste himself began refusing to pay federal taxes for the first time that year.

He also worked against the nuclear threat through more conventional means. Very soon after the war ended, Muste began establishing contact and dialogue with atomic scientists, many of whom were deeply disturbed at the application their work was finding. These talks resulted in the founding in 1949 of the Society for Social Responsibility in the Sciences.

Throughout the 1950s and early '60s, Muste was deeply involved in raising the issue of nuclear weapons in the churches. In 1950 Muste helped organize a Conference on Church and War that was held in Detroit and attended by about 800 delegates and observers. After three days of study and prayer, the participants, who included many respected clergy and academics, issued an Affirmation and Appeal which urged the churches to "speak a distinctive and steadying word, drawn not from the judgments of the secular world but from its own gospel."

An important by-product of the conference was the establishment of the Church Peace Mission, which under Muste's guidance for the next 12 years educated church leaders on biblical pacifism in the nuclear age and sought to influence church and ecumenical statements on war and peace and nuclear weapons.

At the same time that Muste sought to forge a theological and political consensus against war in the nuclear age, he worked against the Cold War policies that seemed to be setting the stage for a third world war between the United States and the Soviet Union. He opposed the United States' program to assert its economic, political, and military dominion across the globe. Instead he preached that only a cooperative world order free of superpowers, in which self-determination was honored and power and wealth shared equitably, could create the basis for peace.

Muste also worked courageously against the limitations on dissent and freedom of speech that the Cold War was bringing to the United States. Throughout the darkest years of McCarthyism, he insisted that members of the Communist Party had a right to hold and express their political ideas. Muste always noted that he considered the Communists' ideas pernicious and wrongheaded, but he preferred to trust the good sense of the American people instead of endorsing the institution of a thought police.

Muste also played a seminal behind-the-scenes role in the formation of the contemporary black civil rights movement. Muste's own public commitment to racial equality went all the way back to the 1920s, when Brookwood College was one of a very few fully integrated institutions in the labor movement. During World War II Muste was integrally involved in supporting the strikes and fasts carried on by imprisoned draft resisters that were successful in eliminating racial segregation in federal prisons and the Civilian Public Service camps.

After the war Muste made the struggle for racial equality an organizational priority at FOR. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the first group to use nonviolent direct action against segregation laws, was founded as an offshoot of FOR. Three young black FOR staffers (George Houser, Bayard Rustin, and James Farmer) organized and administered CORE from the Fellowship offices.

In 1947 CORE sponsored the first freedom ride, called the Journey of Reconciliation, in which 16 men (eight black and eight white) took a bus trip into the South to test new federal regulations against segregation in interstate transportation. The group encountered some violence and four of them were imprisoned for 22 days in North Carolina. Most historians of the black freedom movement would agree that CORE's early experiments in the application of Gandhian techniques to the segregation laws were among the most significant sources of the tidal wave of resistance to racism that was to come in the next decade.

In the 1950s CORE went into eclipse, but Muste's influence continued to be felt in the civil rights movement, especially through the central involvement of Rustin, who served as an adviser and strategist at the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott and was the chief organizer of the historic 1963 March on Washington.

In the fall of 1953 Muste, then 68 years old, left his position as executive secretary of FOR. During the previous year the Muste family had been plagued with medical crises. Anna Muste had become an invalid, and her condition was steadily worsening. A. J. was hospitalized for a prostate operation, and their son John had contracted polio during a trip to Mexico and was recuperating at his parents' home. One year after Muste's retirement from the FOR, his wife's long illness ended with her death.

It would seem that Muste's life was then winding down. But Muste refused to settle into the role of pensioned elder statesman. In fact the last years of his life may have been more filled with activity than any previous period. Muste would, in the next years, turn toward more bold and sometimes risky experiments in non-violent action.

In August 1957 the 72-year-old Muste was among those who braved the brutal desert heat to organize a vigil at the Nevada nuclear weapons test site. The action was timed to coincide with the open-air explosion of an atomic bomb on the twelfth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Muste joined 10 other protesters in walking into the restricted test area, where they were arrested. In 1959 Muste joined an action at the Strategic Air Command base near Omaha, Nebraska, in which he climbed the fence and illegally entered the base. After being escorted out, Muste climbed the fence again and was arrested. He spent nine days in jail awaiting trial before receiving a suspended sentence.

Later that year Muste became involved in an international project aimed at stopping a French nuclear weapons test in the Algerian Sahara, which at that time was still French colonial territory. A team of European and American peace activists based in Ghana worked to link the issue of the nuclear arms race with the wave of anti-colonial rebellion that was sweeping Africa and the rest of the Third World. The project was well-received by the Africans, and a number of Ghanaians joined the group that attempted to reach and occupy the proposed test site. Although they were turned back at the border, and the French test went ahead, the campaign received extensive international press attention.

Although they were often perceived as bizarre or eccentric at the time, the series of direct action campaigns that Muste and his colleagues carried out in the late 1950s and early '60s, especially around the nuclear issue, had an important role in creating the atmosphere of crisis that led to massive disarmament demonstrations and ultimately resulted in the atmospheric test ban treaty. Unfortunately, public interest in the nuclear issue subsided after the test ban treaty was signed. But at the same time, Muste and many other American peace activists were turning their attention to a new crisis, the growing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

By 1965 when the United States began in earnest its headlong descent into Vietnam, Muste was 80 years old. But the horror that his country was inflicting on the people of Vietnam wouldn't allow him to rest. He threw all of the time and energy he had left into building the American opposition to that war. He participated in protests at the Pentagon, and at home in New York he became the central figure in the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee. The Peace Parade group was a coalition covering the entire spectrum of liberal, left, and pacifist forces, many of whom were not on speaking terms at the time and could only have been brought together by one with the broad experience of an A.J. Muste. During the national Days of Protest in October 1965, the Committee's anti-war march through Manhattan drew at least 25,000 people, an astounding figure at the time.

In 1966 Muste was intensely involved in pulling together another huge anti-war rally in Central Park in March and simultaneously preparing for a trip by a delegation of U.S. peace activists to south Vietnam. In April, Muste and five others arrived in Saigon, where they held a press conference denouncing U.S. involvement in the war and attempted to hold a demonstration in front of the U.S. embassy. At the embassy they were arrested by south Vietnamese police, held briefly, and then deported.

In January 1967 Muste undertook his last journey for peace, this time to north Vietnam with a delegation of elders of the peace movement that included Muste and Martin Niemoller (a 75-year-old veteran of the German confessing church movement), as well as an Anglican bishop and an American rabbi (both aged 67).

In Vietnam the group witnessed the horrible damage done by the United States' indiscriminate bombing of Vietnam and met with two American prisoners of war. They also had audiences with the elders of the Vietnamese independence struggle, Premier Pham Van Dong and President Ho Chi Minh. After presenting each of his guests with a hand-carved walking stick, Ho asked them to deliver a message to President Lyndon Johnson inviting him to come to Hanoi for peace talks. Ho added, "As an old revolutionary I pledge my honor that Mr. Johnson will have complete security." Muste later transmitted the invitation to Johnson in a letter that was never answered.

Just two weeks after he returned from Vietnam, Muste went to his doctor complaining of a sharp pain in his back. He was given a prescription for a pain-killer, but the pain worsened through the night. Finally he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors determined that he was suffering from an aneurism. Preparations for surgery were begun, but before he reached the table Muste was dead. A friend later noted that Muste's death was "typical of him. He allocated 82 years to living but only one day for dying."

Peace activists all over the country held hastily organized memorial services for Muste. In New York a series of events took place, aside from the small funeral for family and closest friends. A meeting two days after his death at which Muste had planned to announce the 1967 Spring Mobilization against the war was transformed into a night of tribute to Muste.

To all outward appearances, Muste's legacy of accomplishments in almost 60 years of activism is at best mixed. Some of the causes to which he gave himself, such as the situation of industrial workers and the rights of black Americans, saw clear progress during his lifetime, though America's social and economic structures never came close to the radical transformations Muste envisioned.

In the struggle for peace and an equitable international order, no visible progress could be discerned at the end of Muste's days. The nuclear arms race was continuing to escalate, and America was surpassing even the brutality of the old colonial masters in its domination of the Third World. The only hopeful sign he saw in his last days was the huge number of young Americans who were rising up against America's oppressive and murderous role in the world.

From our vantage point 17 years later, it seems clear that whatever progress was made during Muste's life, even on labor and civil rights issues, is at the point of being decisively reversed.

But we would be mistaken to look for Muste's legacy in the corridors of power. Muste's legacy is finally one of faithfulness; faithfulness to the call of God that he first heard as a child in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and to the promise first given to Abraham that God will create a new people and build a new city on this earth.

Danny Duncan Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.