Gandhi’s campaigns did not push the British out of India. They helped confirm, along with the strain resulting from the Second World War, that the subcontinent was just too large to be effectively controlled by a relatively small and distant state of declining authority and capacity. There was a nationalistic swell in Indian opinion that could not be contained indefinitely. But while Gandhi’s efforts did not by themselves make British rule impossible, they did turn his Congress Party into a credible alternative government to the Raj. The fact that his methods worked with other deeper social and political factors was not a reason to dismiss them, although it did raise questions about their effectiveness in other contexts.
At a time of brutality and upheaval across the world, Gandhi stood out as a leader who personified dignity and goodness in the simplicity of his dress and diet, and in his spiritual message. At the same time, he managed to forge an authentic and successful mass movement. Gandhi took the familiar tactics of the underdogs—marches, strikes, and boycotts—and employed them as part of a grander and nobler narrative. His claim to be reaching out to the good in his opponents and the promise of reconciliation left open the possibility of compromise. Was this a strategic formula of wide application or one specially suited to the circumstances of India? It depended on a moral authority that rested on claims to be asserting universal and timeless values, but might its success be due to a very particular set of circumstances?
To argue that nonviolence would be invariably effective ducked the moral question, because it ignored the possibility of hard choices. The method acquired authority and dignity precisely because one possible outcome was extreme suffering and no political gain. Yet if there was no reasonable promise of success, then insisting on nonviolence meant tolerating a greater evil and putting followers at risk, leaving them without defenses and in danger. Even accepting that no good would ever come out of a resort to violence, it might still be that nonviolence could result in greater harm. The issue was posed in a particularly sharp form with the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Nonviolence might work well with the British, who wished to avoid a violent struggle and could be embarrassed by displays of popular resistance, but Gandhi’s conviction that his methods would work against the Nazis was barely credible. Nor did he cope well when his own people fought each other, as India gained independence. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to bridge the vicious sectarian divide between Hindus and Muslims and he suffered a violent death at the hands of an assassin in 1948.
The Potential of Nonviolence
Gandhi’s influence was felt in the campaign for civil rights for blacks in the American South, where segregation and discrimination were rigidly enforced. Although the possible use of nonviolent tactics was mentioned during the interwar years, it was not until after the Second World War that such methods were embraced in what became a remarkably successful campaign.
There were obvious differences in the two settings. Gandhi was stirring up the whole Indian population against a distant imperialist power. Blacks were a minority facing an unforgiving local majority. Their predicament posed in a sharp form the underlying dilemmas facing a nonviolent strategy. The so-called Jim Crow laws (named after a caricature black from a minstrel show) had been passed by southern legislatures after the Civil War and were often backed by crude violence. They made it extremely difficult for blacks to vote; meant segregated facilities for eating, transportation, burial, medical, and school facilities; and banned cohabitation and marriage between whites and non-whites. A search for goodness among the segregationists appeared a short and futile journey, and defiance could be suicidal.
The barriers imposed on the ability of blacks to make their way economically as well as politically had undermined the Atlanta Compromise of 1895, proposed by Booker T. Washington. “The wisest of my race,” he had observed, “understand that agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.” Instead, his people would work at thrift and industry, become model employees, and so gradually join American society as equals (for “no race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized”). Citizenship would assuredly follow. Not surprisingly, the compromise was warmly embraced by black and white moderates. The premise that it would be hard to attain political power without economic power had some validity. In practice, however, with little progress on either the economic or political front, the compromise was increasingly seen as a recipe for prolonged servitude. A more radical but also analytical edge was provided by W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African-American to secure a Ph.D. from Harvard. He had studied with Weber in Germany and the two kept in touch. Weber considered him to be one of America’s most gifted sociologists and cited him as a counter-example when challenging racial stereotypes. Du Bois undertook major research programs on the “Negro problem,” demonstrating the impact of political choices rather than some primordial difference between the races. He campaigned for civil rights and founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with the support of such white reformers as Jane Addams and John Dewey.
In 1924, Du Bois published a critique of nonviolence by Franklin Frazier, another black (and Chicago-trained) sociologist, in The Crisis, the NAACP’s official organ. Frazier mocked the idea of turning the other cheek in the face of violence. This was just after an anti-lynching law had been filibustered out of the Senate, demonstrating that the southern white establishment condoned racist murders as a way of intimidating blacks. Responding to Frazier, the white Quaker Ellen Winsor pointed to Gandhi and wondered whether a similar figure could “arise in this country to lead the people out of their misery and ignorance, not by the old way of brute force which breeds sorrow and wrong, but by the new methods of education based on economic justice leading straight to Freedom.” A rejoinder came from Frazier:
Suppose there should arise a Gandhi to lead Negroes without hate in their hearts to stop tilling the fields of the South under the peonage system; to cease paying taxes to States that keep their children in ignorance; and to ignore the iniquitous disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws, I fear we would witness an unprecedented massacre of defenseless black men and women in the name of Law and Order and there would scarcely be enough Christian sentiment in America to stay the flood of blood.
When, a few years later, Du Bois invited and received an article from Gandhi, he added his own observation: “Agitation, non-violence, refusal to cooperate with the oppressor, became Gandhi’s watchword and with it he is leading all India to freedom. Here and today he stretches out his hand in fellowship to his colored friends of the West.”8 Du Bois focused more on Gandhi’s readiness to engage in direct action and his refusal to yield to oppression than on his underlying philosophy. On that he remained skeptical. As other American black activists started to talk of Gandhian campaigns, Du Bois pointed out how tactics of fasting, public prayer, and self-sacrifice were alien to the United States but had been “bred into the very bone of India for more than three thousand years.”9
Gandhi never visited the United States but understood its political importance to his own cause—gaining independence from the British—and also the potential relevance of his ideas to the divisions within American society.10 The initial impetus of contact with Gandhi was not specifically related to the black cause. It reflected the traditional pacifist focus on war and a more recent interest in labor unrest. While Richard Gregg was working as a lawyer on labor disputes in the early 1920s, he developed sympathy with the unions and was appalled by the violence used by employers to suppress them. Worried about the dangers if workers responded in kind, he explored passive resistance. This led him to take up residence in India where he was in regular contact with Gandhi. On his return, he wrote a series of books encouraging a move away from traditional pacifism as a difficult moral choice, an expression of an inner conviction about the sanctity of human life preoccupied with the problem of war, to a more strategic appreciation of the special power conferred by a
commitment to nonviolence when engaged in domestic conflicts. He sought to extricate pacifism “from the profitless atmosphere of emotional adjectives and of vague mysticism, futile protests and sentimentalism combined with confused thinking.” Rather than stress the contrast with traditional military strategy, he urged his readers to see nonviolence as another type of weapon, an innovation in warfare that made it possible to struggle without killing.11
Gregg was particularly intrigued by the possibility of using suffering to dramatize issues. At issue was not personal belief but whether actions could shame opponents and gain sympathy from onlookers. He described how nonviolent resistance to violent attack would work as a “sort of moral jiu-jitsu,” causing the attacker to “lose his moral balance.” This depended on a change of heart, which in turn depended on the nervous system triggering an almost involuntary empathetic response to another’s suffering. In the modern age the extent and impact of such responses would be far greater because of mass media. The unique drama of defenseless men and women accepting vicious assaults made for a fascinating “story” and “wonderful news.” The likely bad publicity posed a threat to the attacker. He was alive to the potential relevance of this approach to the struggle for black rights and was in touch with his fellow Harvard alumnus, W. E. B. Du Bois. It is unclear what Du Bois thought of Gregg’s characterization of Negroes as a “gentle race, accustomed to marvelous endurance of suffering” and thus ideally suited to a nonviolent campaign.
While Gregg was exploring whether nonviolence could be made to work as a strategy, Reinhold Niebuhr, a Protestant minister, was concluding that it could not. His starting point was similar in that he had also been radicalized by his experience of labor relations, in this case as a pastor in Detroit working with Ford workers. Gradually he came to see nonviolence as supporting the status quo. He could not object to the principle, but he warned about the consequences of its application in an imperfect world. He did not share the optimism in man’s essential goodness. It was unwise to expect those who benefited from inequality and injustice to respond positively to reasonable requests for equality and justice. Instead of approaching the powerful with a perfect and somehow irresistible love they must be confronted with counter-power. His views were expressed in a remarkable and influential book, Moral Man and Immoral Society.12
Niebuhr’s focus on power led him to become identified as a key realist thinker, unique because he framed the issues in theological terms. For our purposes we do not need to explore the theological issues too deeply. Niebuhr saw the urge to power as the way by which men sought to give themselves significance in the face of an infinite universe. This inherent self-regard was aggravated by the nature of human consciousness. Because human beings could imagine how their desires could be fulfilled well beyond immediate possibilities, there was an urge to self-aggrandizement which, unless checked, would see any possibility of compromise displaced by preparations for a fight. Though reason would dictate cooperation and nonviolence, unfortunately there was “no miracle by which men can achieve a rationality high enough to give them as vivid an understanding of general interests as of their own.” Groups made matters worse, for crowds were poor at reasoning. As a result, attempts to deal with groups by the sort of loving morality that might work with individuals could well be disastrous.
Niebuhr was aware that this gloomy view of human nature and the role of power and interest in human affairs could lead to defeatism among the victims of injustice and inequality. But realism, he judged, was a better place to start than a naïve and sentimental idealism, overestimating the potential goodness and trustworthiness of others. Those who refused to recognize the reality of conflict and address issues of power tended to propose measures that were in practice timid and ineffectual. Their discomfort with forms of compulsion, including force, rendered them incapable of achieving justice. “Immediate consequences,” he observed in terms of which Weber would have approved, “must be weighed against ultimate consequences.” Contrary to the view that some means could never be justified, Niebuhr was prepared to argue that ends do provide a justification. Again, a society’s morality was different from an individual’s because there was so much more at stake. An individual’s pursuit of the absolute may be futile. When a society pursues the absolute, it “risk[s] the welfare of millions.” Better then to discourage a search for perfection in societies and accept compromise.
The next stage in his argument was to deny any rigid distinction between violent and nonviolent coercion. “As long as it enters the field of social and physical relations and places physical restraints upon the desires and activities of others, it is a form of physical coercion.” Even apparently nonviolent action could lead to hurt. Gandhi’s boycott of British textiles, for example, hurt British textile workers. Niebuhr gave the impression of being more irritated by the self-righteousness of the practitioners of nonviolence than the practice itself. He appreciated its potential advantage as protecting “the agent against the resentments which violent conflict always creates in both parties to a conflict.” It could also demonstrate an interest in a peaceful resolution. Intriguingly, Niebuhr noted the potential strategic value of nonviolence “for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.” He added that for that reason it would be appropriate for the “emancipation of the Negro race in America.”
An American Gandhi?
In May 1942, “the first organized civil rights sit-in in American history” took place at the Jack Spratt Coffee House in Chicago when a group of twenty-eight people divided themselves up into small groups, each including at least one black man or woman, and sat down. The coffee house’s small staff was caught in confusion, especially as attempts to avoid serving the blacks at all, or at most serve them out of sight, gained little sympathy from either other customers or the police when they were called.13 This effort was successful. Taking place in Chicago, before the city’s later deterioration in race relations, it was not as severe a test as would later be faced in southern states, but it demonstrated the possibility that firm but polite action might disorient racists and expose discrimination.
At the heart of the action was James Farmer, a young African-American from Texas who had graduated in theology. He was then the race relations secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a strongly pacifist group based in New York. It was formed in 1915 by a number of leading antiwar figures, including Jane Addams and A. J. Muste. A minister who later became an active trade unionist and socialist, Muste was FOR’s executive director from 1940 to 1953.14 Over this period, pacifists once again found themselves on the wrong side of a popular cause. This time the evil of the enemy was more than propagandistic bombast and the country had been caught by a surprise attack.
Farmer had been agitating to establish a distinct organization charged with promoting racial equality and was permitted to see if something could be achieved in Chicago before consideration was given to taking his idea further. There was already a FOR group at the University of Chicago, led by George Houser, who had been thinking along similar lines. Together they formed the Committee (later Congress) of Racial Equality (CORE). It eventually became more important than its parent. Distracted already by the war, FOR now had young activists wishing to employ tactics that were provocative and bound to raise tensions, moving beyond love and reason to coercion. When Farmer first presented to FOR his “Brotherhood Mobilization Plan,” he faced objections on the grounds that not only would this divert effort and attention away from the antiwar effort but also that the protests would be warlike, not overtly violent but sufficient to disrupt peace and tranquility and fail to turn the racist’s heart toward justice. Farmer saw these Tolstoy-like arguments as supporting passivity. Failure to act would perpetuate the everyday violence of segregation. He believed in the nonviolent creed, but his standard was effectiveness not purity of motive. For the same reason he did not wish CORE to be open only to true pa
cifists.15 He told a disappointed Muste, who had mixed feelings about a new national and not overtly pacifist organization, the “masses of Negroes will not become pacifists. Being Negroes for them is tough enough without being pacifist, too. Neither will the masses of whites.”16
Farmer’s guide when taking on Jack Spratt’s Coffee House was Krishnalal Shridharani, a journalist who had followed Gandhi in India to the point of being arrested. His War Without Violence was pragmatic, a practical manual alerting practitioners to focus on the evil rather than the evildoer and ensure that the action was directly relevant to the particular evil being addressed. His description of the effect of nonviolence on opponents was largely drawn from Gregg and stressed the psychological confusion caused by unexpected tactics. He was the guest speaker at CORE’s founding conference in June 1943. Farmer recorded his surprise that instead of a Gandhi-like figure, ascetic and bony, he found a well-dressed and well-fed Brahman, with rings on his fingers and smoking a cigar. Perhaps it was therefore not surprising that Shridharani played down the moral aspects of Gandhism and stressed the strategic, dwelling on the opportunities provided by modern media to use dramatic actions to spread a political message. He suspected that American pacifists exaggerated the spiritual dimensions of an Indian movement that was largely secular. The religious aspects of satyagraha were of “propaganda and publicity reasons as well as for the personal satisfaction of deeply conscientious men like Gandhi” and his disciples. Nonviolence had been adopted for “earthly, tangible, and collective aims” and so could be “discarded if it does not work.”17 He grasped the impact of the refusal to engage with the fight with Hitler on the credibility of pacifism, which led to his own skepticism about FOR and its leadership.
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