Nonviolence (20 page)

In prison, Badshah Khan explained to his jailer that he was a nonviolent follower of Gandhi. The British deputy commissioner asked him what he would be doing if he hadn't met Gandhi and Khan put his large hands on the two bars in front of him and easily bent them apart.

Khan's stated concept of Islam was this:

The Holy Prophet Mohammed came into this world and taught us, “That man is a Muslim who never hurts anyone by word or deed, but who works for the benefit and happiness of God's creatures. Belief in God is to love one's fellow men.”

For putting these dangerous ideas into practice, the “gentle British” held him for a total of thirty years, one third of his life,
serving various prison terms, most of it in solitary confinement, usually under a charge of “sedition.”

When World War II broke out Gandhi did not want to repeat his mistake of the first World War. This time he offered to support the British only if they would promise independence after the war. They declined, and he continued his campaign, for which he spent two years in prison. After the war, facing further disruption, the British agreed to independence in 1947.

But the terms of independence were a disappointment to Gandhi, since they divided the Muslims and Hindus into Pakistan and India. This is the issue over which he was assassinated in January 1948 by a fanatical Hindu who feared that his nonviolent approach would give too much away to the Muslims. While Gandhi is remembered by the nation he created, his teachings are not followed. His closest collaborator, Jawaharlal Nehru, leading the newly independent India, quickly responded to challenges from Pakistan on the border, China from Tibet, and Portugal in Goa, by building a militarized Indian state. But the enduring importance of Gandhi in the world was that he demonstrated in pragmatic steps how nonviolence could work. Nowhere did he have a greater impact than in the United States.

In the 1920s a Quaker lawyer, Richard Gregg, stumbled across Gandhi's writings by chance. In 1925, having studied everything he could find by Gandhi, he decided to follow him to India, where he spent the next four years, including seven months at Gandhi's ashram. Returning to the United States in 1929, he gave up his law practice and instead wrote and lectured on Gandhi's theories of nonviolence. He became the leading American theorist of non-violence, publishing
The Power of Nonviolence
in 1934, a book he dedicated to Gandhi. For those accustomed to reading on non-violence, this book had an oddly pragmatic tenor. His main point was that nonviolence works, that it is an effective way to get things done.

George Houser, along with David Dellinger, had been one of nine students at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City who refused to register for the draft in 1940 and were sent to prison. Houser had written to A. J. Muste (who
Time
magazine in 1937 called “America's number one pacifist”), and their correspondence continued when Houser was in prison. Much of the dialogue was about the importance of establishing an official nonviolent movement. As a leader in the United Textile Workers Union, Muste, himself much influenced by the writings of Richard Gregg, had moved the union toward nonviolent tactics, starting with a 1936 “lie-down picketing.” In 1937, Alexander McKeown, the national vice president of the American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers, said:

As a rule men and women hesitate to adopt the tactics of a Gandhi in an industrial or civil dispute for fear of seeming to make fools of themselves. The fact of the matter is that nonviolence is a tactic that requires perhaps a higher type of courage and devotion than is called for in ordinary physical combat.

In 1941 Muste became director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), which had been founded in 1915 by anti–World War I protesters and was by then run by traditional pacifists, followers of what Muste called “the sentimental, easygoing pacifism of the earlier part of the century.” Muste, like Gandhi, saw pacifism as a tool for political activism. “In a world built on violence,” he wrote in a 1928 essay, “one must be a revolutionary before one can be a pacifist.”

With World War II in progress, it was difficult to attract support for nonviolence in international affairs, but Muste believed that the techniques of nonviolent resistance would prove particularly effective in race issues, such as the desegregation of the South. In seeking a new young staff for the FOR, he brought in James Farmer, a large man with a booming voice who had recently received a doctorate from Howard University, where he had studied the teachings
of Gandhi. Farmer was a Southerner, the son of a college professor. His father, the son of slaves, on receiving a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1918, became one of only twenty-five African-Americans ever to hold a Ph.D. Muste also brought in Bayard Rustin, a young black Quaker from Pennsylvania who had recently, like Muste, abandoned the Communist left for a new kind of radicalism. Rustin was a tall, handsome young man with a rich tenor voice who, prophetically, had recorded the song “Chain Gang” with the folk/ blues great Josh White.

Farmer and Rustin, along with George Houser, became active in an organization formed in Chicago in 1942 called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). CORE had a guru-like adviser, Krishnalal Shridharani, a disciple of Gandhi despite his love of women, food, cigars, and other earthly pleasures. “Just where everything will lead, we do not know,” Houser wrote to Muste, informing him of the creation of CORE. “But sooner or later we are likely to hit on something big.” In 1943, sit-ins forced the integration of Denver movie theaters and integrated an all-white cafeteria in Detroit.

Rustin, Houser, and Farmer were all World War II resisters. In 1944 Rustin denounced his Quaker draft deferment and went to prison for twenty-seven months to protest the war.

In 1947 Houser and Rustin organized the “Journey for Reconciliation,” testing a recent Supreme Court decision that found segregated interstate travel accommodations to be unconstitutional. This is considered the first “Freedom Ride,” except for a 1942 bus trip from Louisville to Nashville when Rustin, traveling alone, refused to sit in the back of the bus. He was taken off the bus and taken to a local police station, where he was severely beaten. Following the Gandhian principles of resistance, Rustin did not fight back but kept trying to reason with the men as they worked him over. Finally one of the white passengers interceded for his release. “I believe the nigger's crazy,” said the police chief.

Richard Gregg called it “moral jiujitsu.” The attacker expects resistance, and when there is none he loses his “moral balance.” It was effective but dangerous. James Farmer, who had endured numerous
beatings, said in a 1991 interview, “Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination.”

In 1947 Houser and Rustin recruited eight whites and eight blacks to sit in the “wrong” section of segregated buses on a two-week journey through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The head of the NAACP's legal department, Thurgood Marshall, warned against the plan, saying that “a disobedience movement on the part of Negroes and their white allies, if employed in the South, would result in wholesale slaughter with no good achieved.”

Bayard Rustin and another black, Andrew Johnson, were sentenced in North Carolina to thirty days on a chain gang. Rustin, who had learned his Gandhi well, gladly accepted his sentence, saying that it might be good for the cause. When he got out, he went to India for six months at the invitation of the ruling Congress Party.

Rustin went on to gladly accept more beatings. Marching against the Korean War in 1951, he was attacked with a stick by an angry spectator. Rustin handed him a second stick and asked him if he wanted to use both. The attacker threw both sticks down.

Rustin once said of his mentor in nonviolence, A. J. Muste, “During all my work with Martin King, I never made a difficult decision without talking the problem over with A.J. first.” Rustin and Farmer were not the only civil rights leaders influenced by Muste. In 1949, Martin Luther King Jr., a young student at Crozer Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pennsylvania, who had written on his application that he had “an inescapable urge to serve society,” attended a lecture by Muste on nonviolence. Francis Stewart, a white friend from Georgia, later recalled ”a pretty heated argument” between Muste and King after the lecture. “King sure as hell wasn't any pacifist then.” King himself stated that most of the time he was in the seminary he continued to believe “the only way we could solve our problem of segregation was an armed revolt.” Later that year, King attended a lecture about the work of Gandhi by Howard University president Mordecai Johnson, freshly returned from a
trip to India. And after he had changed his thinking, he talked about his first encounter with Muste:

I wasn't a pacifist then, but the power of A.J.'s sincerity and his hard-headed ability to defend his position stayed with me through the years. Later, I got to know him better, and 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.

In 1955, at the beginning of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, one of the actions that put King at the head of the civil rights movement, the FOR sent Bayard Rustin to instruct King in nonvio-lent techniques. King was immediately drawn to the older, more experienced Rustin as a mentor, but Rustin, while recognizing the young man's enormous talent, saw that he understood nothing of how to mount a nonviolent campaign. His house was strewn with firearms. Rustin laughed about nearly sitting on one by mistake.

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s became one of the most influential nonviolent movements in history, admired and emulated around the world. It helped shape an international anti-nuclear movement in which Muste, Rustin, and others from the civil rights movement were also deeply involved.

Nuclear weapons might have completely ended warfare. They ruined the concept of total war. Clausewitz had defined a victor as the side that ended up with the ability to impose its will, its program, on the other. A nuclear war would have no victor, because, as Clausewitz also pointed out, “War is a constant case of reciprocal action, the effects of which are mutual.” An aerial attack like Coventry or Dresden might gain acceptance in a future war, and has, but not mutual Hiroshima, and the technology rapidly progressed to the point where nuclear weapons were many times worse than that. In 1969, political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote:

The technical development of the implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict. Hence, warfare—from time immemorial the final merciless arbiter in international disputes—has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all its glamour. The “apocalyptic” chess game between the super-powers, that is, between those that move on the highest plane of our civilization, is being played according to the rule “if either ‘wins' it is the end of both”; it is a game that bears no resemblance to whatever war games preceded it. Its “rational” goal is deterrence, not victory, and the arms race, no longer a preparation for war, can now be justified only on the grounds that more and more deterrence is the best guarantee of peace. To the question how shall we ever extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer.

Nuclear weapons did not end warfare, because that would have required political leaders to completely rethink their concept of power. As Hungarian writer György Konrád pointed out, the political elite had no alternative concept. “They have none because they are professionals of power. Why should they choose values that are in direct opposition to physical force?” And so, faced with nuclear destruction, the goal, rather than ending war, became limiting it.

Total warfare, using all available means to win, was no longer a viable concept. Words such as
glory
and
honor,
which David Low Dodge had called an “empty bubble” and a “standard of right and wrong without form or dimension,” were at last stripped from the vocabulary. Clive Bell had written during World War I: “If we were sure that we could ‘smash' the Germans only by smashing everyone else, ourselves included, I suppose we should desist from our endeavor.” And that was exactly what war had become in the nuclear age.

Leading scientists, writers, political activists, and the general population around the world agreed on their opposition to nuclear weapons. The so-called “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,” So-viet physicist Andrei Sakharov, and Albert Einstein, the Western “nuclear father,” were in agreement. Sakharov took on Clausewitz's famous dictum that war was “a continuation of politics by other means,” saying, “A thermonuclear war cannot be considered a continuation
of politics by other means. It would be a means of universal suicide.” While governments were playing out their Cold War, young people in both blocs were having their ideas shaped as they were being taught to crouch under their school desks, which someone somewhere had decided would be the one safe place for them in the event of a nuclear World War III.

Some films, such as Stanley Kubrick's 1964
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,
and Stanley Kramer's 1959
On the Beach,
as well as Nevil Shute's 1957 novel on which the Kramer film was based, presented the antinuclear argument, while a barrage of westerns of the same period taught that it wasn't good to fight but that when the bad guy comes to town, a man has to pick up a gun.

Throughout much of the world, the antinuclear movement steadily grew through the 1950s, so that a small, marginal, anti-nuclear group, SANE, founded in 1957, could three years later pack Madison Square Garden with more than 20,000 supporters.