“A.J. Muste: The Contradictions and Promise of the American Left” by Andrew Hartman No single individual better embodied the contradictions and promise of the twentieth-century American left than A.J. Muste. Lest you think this a wild overstatement, read the following lengthy passage from the introduction of Leilah Danielson’s fantastic biography of Muste, American Gandhi: Like others who came of age in the 1910s, [Muste] was a modernist, convinced of the plasticity of the self and the environment. But in the 1930s and 1940s, he shared in the introspective turn of many of his comrades, questioning his assumptions about reason, history, Read more