of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, Muste narrowly escaped arrest when a local Baptist minister charged him with seditious speech.100
As this experience suggests, the persecution of dissenters intensified even as the war wound to a close. By the late summer of 1918, so-called ‘‘slacker raids’’ reached a fevered pitch, as patriot volunteers rounded up men suspected of dodging the draft. By the end of the war in November 1918, the country was in the midst of a full-fledged Red Scare, culminating in the ‘‘Palmer raids’’ of 1920 in which Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer rounded up hundreds of political radicals in the labor movement and deported some five hundred of them.
Yet it would be misleading to emphasize only the repressive atmosphere of the immediate postwar years; for the left, 1918–20 was also a time of expectancy, urgency, and optimism. In Russia, the Red Army defeated counterrevolutionaries and brought their revolution into eastern Europe, while in western Europe trade unions broke free of their exclusivist traditions and became mass movements for democratic control of industry. Meanwhile, in the colonized world, uprisings suggested that the era of imperialism was nearing an end. Even in the United States, where American capital emerged from the war stronger than ever, many believed that capitalism was in its ‘‘death throes’’ and that they were part of an international movement giving birth to a more egalitarian social order. With Soviet Russia as their beacon, they looked to the labor movement to make their dreams of revolution a reality. The eruption of a massive strike wave involving some four million workers throughout the country suggested that labor was indeed realizing its historic role. There were general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg, strikes among longshoremen, stockyard workers, carpenters, textile and clothing workers, telephone operators, and, most dramatically, the Great Steel Strike of 1919, involving 365,000 steel workers. Proposals for reconstructing the social order came from across the liberal-left political spectrum. Even the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) entertained proposals to extend wartime economic controls, establish social insurance, and nationalize the railways.101
Muste was deeply affected by the era’s revolutionary spirit, as well as by ‘‘the visions of the prophets of a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness would prevail and every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none should be afraid.’’ Convinced that ‘‘a new world’’ was ‘‘about to be born,’’ he joined other members of the Boston FOR in founding ‘‘the Comradeship,’’ a group committed to examining ‘‘the question of how to organize our lives so that they would truly express the teachings and spirit of Jesus.’’102 In November, he moved his family from Providence to the Comradeship’s headquarters in a rented house in the working-class neighborhood adjacent to Back Bay. They lived on the second floor, while pacifist minister Harold Rotzel, his wife, and three-year-old daughter lived on the third. Other members of the Comradeship included Cedric Long, another minister who had lost his pulpit because of his opposition to the war, and three women of independent means: Anna N. Davis, a Quaker and member of the Hallowell family; Ethel Paine, a prominent Bostonian and descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence; and Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a socialist and a disciple of William James who believed with the philosopher in the reality and ‘‘genius of the trance phenomena.’’ To these women, Muste, Long, and Rotzel were ‘‘saintly’’ characters, and they served as essential sources of support for the Comradeship and for Muste throughout his life.103
The headquarters of the Comradeship served as a sort of alternative community for its members and for a hodgepodge of radicals who used it as a meeting space and safe haven. The spiritual atmosphere was intense. Muste and Rotzel arose every morning at five o’clock, bundled themselves in overcoats, and ‘‘read the New Testament—especially the Sermon on the Mount—together, analyzed the passages, meditated on each phrase, even each word, prayed, and asked ourselves what obedience to those precepts meant for us.’’ Members subjected themselves to a common ‘‘spiritual discipline,’’ while individually setting aside time for Bible study, prayer, and devotional reading.104 Muste appears to have been in a state of religious fervor. As Elizabeth Glendower Evans described him in the winter of 1918–19, ‘‘His face had the inner glow of one fed by spiritual manna.’’105
Evans went on to comment that she ‘‘feared that he and his wife and perhaps even their little children went hungry. However, he made no complaint.’’106 As this comment suggests, for Muste, the transition from upstanding, respectable minister to impoverished radial agitator was eased by the peace of mind that came from following his conscience and from joining a community of shared believers. The same could not be said for Anne Muste, who did not have ‘‘the release of being true to convictions’’ that he had experienced. ‘‘I was imposing a situation on her. What could she do about it?’’ he commented rhetorically, revealing the gender privilege upon which their marriage was based. Indeed, for Anne, the experience involved a loss of community and identity. As Muste noted in his memoir, she was more of ‘‘a social being’’ than he was, ‘‘got more out of the ordinary amenities of life’’ that came with being the wife of a minister. In Newton, the young mother had enjoyed shaded streets, parks and playgrounds, and the support network provided by the Women’s Association of the Central Congregational Church. It was therefore a struggle for her to understand her husband’s decisions and to reconcile herself to their consequences. ‘‘One night [during this period] as we were in bed and were talking things over,’’ Muste recalled, ‘‘she said ‘If you’ll just keep on talking to me as to why you think these things and why you think you have to do them, it will be all right.’ ’’107
By the end of 1918, the Comradeship had drafted a proposal outlining the ideas that had come out of their meetings. As Muste wrote to the FOR, they would form a ‘‘preaching order,’’ a lay group of men and women who felt ‘‘the call’’ to ‘‘rebuke’’ the old order and ‘‘enter upon the new.’’ Members would live simply, share a common fund, submit to a shared ‘‘spiritual discipline,’’ and perhaps even have a ‘‘form of dress peculiar to the order.’’ Through their personal example, as well as through proselytizing, pamphleteering, and going to jail for their beliefs, they would explain ‘‘the facts as to the present order—extremes of wealth and poverty, unearned income, undemocratic control of industry, lack of the right spirit in international relations’’ and the need for ‘‘a radically new order’’ based on ‘‘the principles of Jesus.’’ They hoped that their message would persuade the ‘‘possessing and educated classes’’ to similarly ‘‘renounce the existing order’’ and support the working class in their struggle for economic justice. Among the workers, they hoped to inculcate the ‘‘healthy and divine discontent’’ that came from envisioning a cooperative commonwealth and recognizing the ‘‘futility of violence and the [more promising] way of reason and love.’’ The early Christians clearly served as a model for the Comradeship; just as Paul ‘‘had to cut away from old Jewish associations, in order to fulfill [the Christian] mission,’’ so too would they work independently of the organized churches and identify themselves with the impoverished and needy.108
Significantly, unlike other utopian movements inspired by the vision of ‘‘bringing the Kingdom,’’ the Comradeship did not seek to separate itself from the larger society. There was some discussion of forming an economic cooperative in the country, but only as a base of support and renewal for the preaching order as it brought its message to the masses. Indeed, even as a conservative young college student, Muste had held that character and faith were built through engagement and action, not asceticism and social withdrawal. ‘‘I have a deep-seated conviction that the aim and the essence of life is love,’’ Muste explained in 1957. ‘‘And love is in its inmost nature an affirmation, not a negation; an embracing and being embraced, not rejection and withdrawal.’’109
In 1918, of course, Muste was still a political novitiate and his thinking on such questions was not fully developed. But, precisely at the moment he and his comrades drafted their proposal, a dramatic textile strike erupted in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, giving them an opportunity to translate their ideals of brotherhood and nonviolence into reality. In Lawrence, the diverse and