Little in the early life of Abraham Johannes Muste (1885–1967) enables one to predict what he became later. He was born in the Netherlands and educated in the Dutch Reformed Church, married, fathered three children, and became a minister in New York with a comfortable salary. Further study at the Union Theological Seminary—a place of leftist transformation for several of the writers in this volume, as also for the noted French Huguenot preacher and anti-Nazi activist André Trocmé—radically upended his worldview, and everything came unglued. He rejected Calvinist theology, resigned from his ministry, and took a position in a Congregational church in Massachusetts. Then, after reading Tolstoy and Thoreau, he announced that he had become a pacifist, just as America was moving toward its entry into World War I; he resigned yet again. He became active in the labor movement and in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and was chair of the faculty at Brookwood Labor College in New York from 1921 until 1933, when his principled commitment to activism over scholarship led him to a third resignation. He held in suspension two ideas often understood as contradictory, namely a commitment to revolution and a commitment to nonviolent action; and he was quicker than many of his contemporaries (these being, one should remind oneself, E. E. Cummings and Jeannette Rankin and Edmund Wilson, not the younger activists he was actually working with) to sense that these two commitments entailed a third: to the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr., born some forty-five years after Muste, acknowledged the latter’s large influence on him; a young Bayard Rustin was lucky enough to find him as a mentor.
After World War II Muste’s activity only increased, not only as an organizer but also as a demonstrator; a famous photograph shows him in 1959, well into his seventies, climbing over a gate to enter the Mead missile base in Nebraska, for which he was arrested and spent eight days in jail. He was a characteristically early opponent of the Vietnam War, and would likely have been a principal organizer of the 1967 March on the Pentagon had he not died in February of that year.
Muste was, as his latest and best biographer Leilah Danielson calls him, an “American Gandhi,” and his contributions to peace and justice work are astonishing. (Norman Mailer once described him as “the austere impeccable dean of American anarchists . . . so pure in motive that in comparison to him, Norman Thomas was as Sadie Thompson.”) It is less clear how lasting his writings on peace and justice will turn out to be; most of the essays have the feel of the conservative sermons he began his career by delivering, learned and scrupulously organized, patiently elaborating arguments and considering objections, but not alive on the page in the way King’s sermons are, or Abraham Joshua Heschel’s. Hence the choice to represent Muste here not by a treatise but by a compressed, urgent statement of personal witness, made to a federal grand jury in 1965, at the age of eighty.
IT is impossible for me to cooperate with the Grand Jury in its present investigation of draft card burning by certain individuals and my own activity in that event.
This is not because I have any desire to hide what I have done, nor do I think any others involved in this action have any such desire.
So far from wishing to hold back anything from my fellow-citizens and fellow-religionists, I freely state that on November 6, 1965, I was present at a meeting in Union Square, New York City, where five young men burned their draft cards. I addressed that meeting expressing full support of their action and calling on others to dissociate themselves from support of United States military action in Vietnam and the foreign policy of this nation which led to this war, to military intervention in the Dominican Republic and to similar actions.
I now hold the same views that I did then. I continue to advocate them. I plan to do my utmost to bring home to my fellow-Americans the truth about war as I see it, and about the war in Vietnam and current American foreign policy, and to call upon them to face the question whether reason and conscience do not require them to withdraw all support from these policies and in particular to call for an immediate halt in American military action in Southeast Asia.
I am unable to cooperate in the Grand Jury inquisition into my belief and actions because it is an element, though perhaps a minor one, in the prosecution of the Vietnamese war and in the militarization of this country. It relates to a law about burning draft cards which is clearly intended to induce conformity in wartime, to discourage dissent, and to intimidate those who cannot in conscience support the war, from expressing and acting upon their convictions.
Demanding conformity and penalizing dissent is a pattern on which all governments tend to operate in wartime. Totalitarian governments seek not only to impose complete outward conformity but to obtain unequivocal inner conformity from their subjects.
But it is precisely in wartime and in relation to participation in war that freedom of thought, expression and association is most needed and most precious. In war, vast material resources are drawn upon and destroyed. Incalculable suffering is imposed upon vast numbers of human beings. The youth of the nation are called upon not only to sacrifice their own lives but to engage in the slaughter of the youth of another nation and even of the babies, the mothers, the children, the aged, of the national adversary.
The idea of the freedom and dignity of the human being, of his responsibility to God or his fellows or to history, is an empty mockery if precisely in such matters each individual is not free to think and to decide for himself, and free to obey or disobey orders of so-called superiors. In the presence of these ultimate issues, no man is superior to another.
Few Americans have any question that this was the case with the Germans under Hitler. At the Nuremberg trial we formally took the position as a nation that it was the responsibility of Germans to disobey orders to do evil deeds, not to obey them because a government demanded it or because the nation was at war. Shall we deprive ourselves of the privilege and the responsibility of being autonomous human beings?
To have dissent and opposition in wartime may create a problem for a democratic government, but if it does not have citizens who refuse to be coerced and regimented, it is no longer democratic.
The conclusion may well be that war itself, certainly in the nuclear age, is inhuman, undemocratic and irrational and that we should lead the way in rejecting it. As it is, we lead the world today in piling up the weapons of mass annihilation, and this nation daily dishonors itself by a war in Vietnam which has not been constitutionally declared, which violates our international obligation and in which we slaughter a people on behalf of a dictatorial puppet government which could not exist but for our support and which proclaims its refusal to negotiate.
To reverse this course would be, perhaps, something of a miracle. It would surely be to our honor to pioneer a new future for mankind by performing that miracle. As one of our foremost philosophers and writers has said: “Man has the faculty of interrupting and beginning something new, an ever present reminder that men, though they must die, were not born to die but to begin.”