Abraham Johannes Muste ( ; January 8, 1885 – February 11, 1967) was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, antiwar movement, and civil rights movement.
Early life
Muste was born on January 8, 1885, in the small port city of Zierikzee, Zeeland, in the southwestern Netherlands. His father, Martin Muste, was a coachman who drove for a family that was part of Zeeland's hereditary nobility. With his economic prospects limited in the Netherlands, Martin decided to follow four brothers of his wife, Adriana, and emigrate to America. They made the trans-Atlantic trip as third-class passengers in January 1891.
Muste's mother became ill aboard ship and remained hospitalized for a month at Ellis Island after the family's arrival. Upon her recovery, the family headed west for Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Adriana's four brothers worked at in a variety of small business pursuits.
The family attended services at the Grand Rapids Dutch Reformed Church, a Calvinist congregation in which religious services were conducted in Dutch. Its very existence was testimony to the number of Dutch immigrants in the area. Dancing was prohibited as sin by the church. Also, the singing of secular music and the viewing of dramatic performances were forbidden.
Members of the denomination tended to be of the working class, like most other Dutch people in the area, who were regarded as a source of cheap labor in the years before World War I by the longer-established English-speaking population. Muste later recalled of his fellow Dutch Reformed Church members that they were "all Republicans and would no more have voted for a Democrat than turned horse thief."
Along with the rest of his family, he became naturalized as an American citizen in 1896. He was only 11 years old at the time of his naturalization.
Education and pastoral career
Muste attended Hope College in Holland, Michigan, just west of Grand Rapids, on the coast of Lake Michigan. He graduated in 1905 with a bachelor's degree at age 20. At Hope College, he was class valedictorian, captain of the school's basketball team, and played second base for the baseball squad.
After his graduation, Muste taught Latin and Greek for the 1905–06 academic year at Northwestern Classical Academy (now Northwestern College) in Orange City, Iowa.
In the fall of 1906, Muste went east to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to attend the Theological Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church (now the New Brunswick Theological Seminary). While there, Muste took courses in philosophy at New York University and Columbia University, attended lectures by William James, and met John Dewey, who became a personal friend. While he remained in training to become a minister of the Reformed Church, Muste seems to have begun to question the church's fundamental principles at that time.
He graduated in June 1909 and married his sweetheart from his Hope College days, Anna Huizenga. Muste then was appointed pastor of the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. In his spare time, he used his new parish's proximity to the theologically-liberal Union Theological Seminary to take additional courses there. He ultimately received a Bachelor of Divinity from Union, graduating magna cum laude.
Muste was influenced by the prevalent theology of the social gospel and began reading the ideas of various radical thinkers of the day. He voted for Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs for U.S. president in 1912. Muste would later state that he never again voted for a Republican or Democrat for a major national or state office.
Muste remained as pastor of the Fort Washington Collegiate Church on Washington Heights until 1914, when he became increasingly uncomfortable with the Reformed Church and left it.
Thereafter, he became an independent Congregationalist minister and accepted a pastorate at the Central Congregational Church of Newtonville, Massachusetts in February 1915.
A committed pacifist, Muste joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation shortly after its foundation in 1916. He participated in a peace demonstration late in the summer of 1916, with US entry into the First World War looming and some parishioners withdrawing from his congregation. Pressure began to build further over Muste's pacifist views in April 1917, when the United States formally declared war on the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. After taking two months of vacation leave in the summer of 1917, he decided that the time had come to leave. In December 1917, he formally resigned his pastorate position.
