Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. to End the Vietnam War by Fred Halstead, recently reviewed in World-Outlook, is not just a history. It is an analysis of the elements that came together to create one of the most powerful social movements in U.S. history, one that helped the Vietnamese people hand Washington its first military defeat in the imperialist epoch.
A revolutionary socialist and one of the central leaders of the anti-Vietnam war movement, Halstead was convinced that the working class was central to hobbling the U.S. war machine. However, in the wake of the witch hunt of the 1950s and the relative economic stability of the post-World War II years, mobilizing union power against the Southeast Asian war seemed an insurmountable challenge at the time.
“It was not prowar sentiment on the part of the rank and file that kept the bulk of the unions out of the antiwar movement,” Halstead writes. “It was the bureaucracy. And the objective conditions during the 1960s for a cracking of that bureaucratic hold were not favorable.”
He notes, however, that there were changes taking place “on the edges, around the cracks and fissures.” By 1970, some important union involvement was beginning to grow.
Halstead writes:
“The special circumstances that made possible the beginnings of union involvement in the antiwar movement fell roughly into three categories, sometimes combined. These were (1) unions where the membership and the leadership included large percentages of oppressed national minorities, whose outlook had been affected by the civil rights movement; (2) unions with a radical history and a leadership that still retained certain features of this tradition and to that degree defied the general norm of the American union officialdom, at least as regards the anticommunist hysteria and foreign policy; (3) unions where much of the membership and leadership was fresh out of college and had themselves been part of the student radicalization. These last included unions of welfare workers and in certain areas teachers.”
Halstead notes that, in addition, the labor movement contained “a heavy sprinkling of individual union leaders who had once been radicals. Not all of these had entirely rejected all their youthful ideas… Here and there an occasional such figure who for one reason or another felt secure from reprisals by the AFL-CIO tops would take an antiwar stand.”
Halstead explains that radical pacifist A.J. [Abraham Johannes] Muste’s own personal history put him in a position to take advantage of this as well as anyone. Muste [1885-1967], Halstead says, stood out among the leaders of the movement who could unify the “unrespectable, ‘irrelevant,’ and by no means homogeneous band” that took up the banner against the Vietnam War in the early 1960s and brought together a movement composed of people with many different ideas and beliefs. His working-class roots and experience were at the heart of this.
World-Outlook is publishing below excerpts from Out Now! that give insight to Muste’s emergence as one of the key leaders of the antiwar movement of the 1960s. We do this as part of an effort to bring forward the lessons of the past for those seeking social justice today.
The text below is from the original. Subheadings, photos, and notes are by World-Outlook.
— World-Outlook editors
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Excerpts from Out Now!
Chapter 10: “April 15, 1967”
By Fred Halstead
Muste [born 1885] started his activist life as a Christian pacifist preacher, but between 1919 and 1936 he had been deeply involved with the labor movement, part of the time as a Marxist.
In 1919 he went to Lawrence, Massachusetts, with a group of Quakers to aid a bitter strike of 30,000 textile workers there. Among other things he wanted to introduce some ideas of mass nonviolent struggle. The strike was in bad shape when they arrived and Muste soon found himself elected executive secretary of the strike committee. He was badly beaten by strikebreaking police when he led a march, but he stuck it out and the strike was won. It was one of the early victories for industrial unionism in a mass-production industry.
For a time Muste was general secretary of the Amalgamated Textile Workers Union. Between 1921 and 1933 he was director of Brookwood Labor College, a school for union organizers for which some AFL unions provided scholarships, though the college was independent of the AFL [American Federation of Labor].
During this period, he became a vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers. More important, he helped train a significant number of the organizers who later built the industrial unions of the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations].
Many of his students later moved to the right as they became comfortable in the union bureaucracy, while Muste had moved to the left, but he generally maintained cordial relations with them, at least on a personal level. In 1929 Muste helped found the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), whose members came to be known as Musteites. Its strategy was to work within the AFL on a program of militant industrial unionism, including opposition to racial discrimination.
The great debate within the union movement of the time was whether to continue the dominant AFL policy of organizing only certain skilled crafts into separate unions for each craft, or whether to organize all the workers in an industry — including the unskilled or semiskilled mass-production workers — into one union. In opting for the second course, the CPLA laid some of the groundwork for the rise of the CIO.
The Musteites were also active in organizing unemployed leagues in the depths of the Great Depression. In 1934, through a strategy of unity between the unemployed and the strikers at the Auto-Lite plant in Toledo, Ohio, the CPLA led the first victorious strike in the auto industry. (Sam Pollock, one of the CPLA leaders of this strike, later became president of the Cleveland Meat Cutters. He was one of the very few union officials to attend the conference that gave birth to the 1967 Spring Mobilization.)
Muste’s days as a revolutionary Marxist
It was also in 1934 that the Trotskyists led the successful Minneapolis Teamster strikes.[1] In part on the basis of these experiences the Musteites and the Trotskyists merged their organizations in December 1935 to form the Workers Party of the United States. By that time Muste considered himself a revolutionary Marxist and had in effect set aside both his religion and his pacifist philosophy, though he was still a practitioner of mass nonviolent direct action — at least, as nonviolent as possible.
In this period Muste participated in a number of important labor struggles. In early 1936 at the Goodyear rubber strike in Akron, he was partly responsible for the successful introduction of the sit-down strike technique — borrowed from France — into the American labor scene.
But Muste was disturbed when a majority of the newly born Workers Party voted in early 1936 to dissolve the organization and seek membership in the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. He was discouraged by the defeats of the revolution in Europe, and became convinced that the revolutionary movement could not stop the gathering world war. In this mood he reached back to the origins of his own character and in July 1936 underwent a religious reconversion that was to last the rest of his life.
Return to pacifism and the church
Muste left the Trotskyist movement and returned to pacifism and the church; but he remained a socialist and, as usual, continued to regard his old comrades without rancor.
He became industrial secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and for a time director of the Presbyterian Labor Temple in New York City. In 1940 he became executive secretary of the FOR. In this capacity he assisted those who were jailed for opposition to the Second World War and contributed to the development of a host of organizations and causes, including the Congress of Racial Equality, originally an FOR staff project.
In 1953 he left the active staff of the FOR, becoming secretary emeritus. Muste had many profound differences with the Communist Party but he demonstratively defended their civil liberties during the witch-hunt and was attacked for this by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
In the 1950s he threw himself into the campaign against nuclear weapons and testing, personally participating in the early civil disobedience actions that called attention to the threat, and eventually helping to found both SANE and the Committee for Nonviolent Action.
Muste also had some influence with Martin Luther King, Jr., who had first come to national prominence as the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956. Bayard Rustin, then a Muste protege who also worked in the national office of an all-Black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping-Car Porters, had been the New York contact of E. D. Nixon, the working sleeping-car porter who originated the boycott and convinced King to be its spokesman. Through Rustin, Muste was consulted on many of the strategies that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. In 1963 King himself declared: “I would say unequivocally that the current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations field is due more to A. J. than to anyone else in the country.”
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On February 11, 1967, [Muste] died of a heart attack at the age of eighty-two.
There was much feeling and some tears among those who knew and worked with him, but little anguish because there was no sense of tragedy about A. J.’s life or death. He had lived long and done well by the tasks he set himself.
In terms of the particular role he played in the antiwar movement A. J. was irreplaceable. But when it came, his death did not shatter the coalition. To be sure, there were problems later that would have been easier and perhaps better resolved if he had still been around. But he was not a star or a guru or an organizational dynamo with all the reins in his own two hands. Like all good organizers he was a team worker who tried to bring out the best in those with whom he worked. He was indifferent to the limelight, had accumulated little fame, and few illusions were attached to him. So with his passing the movement simply carried on.
He lived long enough to play a crucial role in unifying antiwar movement
He had lived long enough to play a crucial role in unifying and broadening the antiwar movement while working to maintain its radical thrust, its ability to cut away at the root of the problem. If he had died six months earlier — before the Spring and Student Mobilization Committees were established and on their way — there might well have been some greater political cost.
“Some of A. J.’s friends and co-workers,” commented [David] Dellinger[2] in Liberation, “have been saying that he would not have died when he did unless he felt that he could afford to.” Elsewhere in the same article Dellinger made the following observation about Muste:
“He managed to work creatively with those who shared only a part of his philosophy or strategy, without sacrificing the integrity of his own deepest beliefs or being prevented from engaging in the actions that stemmed from them. It was part of his greatness that he could feel that he was right without becoming self-righteous or demeaning those who could not share in all his activities or attitudes. It was enough for him that they walked part of the way with him and that while walking together he and they could probe and examine and analyze so that each might learn from the other.”
As one who “walked part of the way” with Muste I appreciated this tribute.
NOTES
[1] The 1934 Teamsters strikes built the industrial union movement in Minneapolis and helped pave the way for the CIO. They are recounted by a central leader of that battle, Farrel Dobbs, in a magnificent four-volume series on the class-struggle leadership of the walkouts and organizing drives that transformed the Teamsters union in much of the Midwest into a fighting social movement and pointed the way toward political action independent of the Democrats and Republicans — the parties of the capitalist ruling class.
[2] David Dellinger was a radical pacifist and a central leader of the anti-Vietnam war movement.
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Categories: US History