Ubuntu

George M. Houser and the Struggle for Peace and Freedom on Two Continents

Sheila D. Collins

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780821446959
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This remarkable biography features a white American pacifist minister whose tireless work for justice and human rights helped reshape Black civil rights in the U.S. and Africa.

George M. Houser (1916–2015) was one of the most important civil rights and antiwar activists of the twentieth century. A conscientious objector during World War II, in 1942 Houser cofounded and led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose embrace of nonviolent protest strategies and tactics characterized the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Houser played a critical role in pan-Africanist anticolonial movements, and his more than thirty-year dedication to the cause of human rights and self-determination helped prepare the ground for the toppling of the South African apartheid regime.

Throughout his life, Houser shunned publicity, preferring to let his actions speak his faith. Sheila Collins's well-researched biography recounts the events that informed Houser's life of activism—from his childhood experiences as the son of missionaries in the Philippines to his early grounding in the Social Gospel and the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi. In light of the corruption the U.S. and the world face today, Houser's story of faith and decisive action for human rights and social justice is one for our time.

1

A Man of Many Parts, 1916–38

GEORGE HOUSER WAS A MAN OF SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY PARTS. He was a deeply committed pacifist who went to prison rather than support the war machine; yet he later supported those engaged in armed struggle in Africa. He was a white man who dedicated his life to the liberation of peoples of color. He was a devout Christian who worked with people of different faiths (or no faith), as well as with those who had different ideological commitments, seeing his work for freedom and self-determination as his ministry. He was an internationalist long before the world was connected by the internet. He was a man who took the long view of history and was a fulcrum of progressive change years before the changes he helped set in motion were recognized by the wider society. He was a gentle man who was nevertheless drawn to risk and adventure. He was a fearless man who rarely talked about the courage it took to back unpopular causes, build organizations with no funding, and risk one’s life in serving others. He was also a man who liked to be at the center of the action yet remained in the background, rarely seeking prominence.

The third of four children, George Mills Houser was born to Otto H. and Ethel Mills Houser on June 2, 1916, in Cleveland, Ohio. Otto was a Methodist Episcopal clergyman, and his mother was the daughter of a Methodist clergyman in upstate New York. Otto Houser was an old-school pietist who believed in individual salvation through grace, personal rectitude, and Prohibition. Yet he had a restless, adventurous spirit that would eventually rub off on his son. The family moved every few years, which was an unusual pattern for a Methodist clergyman. Under the Methodist Episcopal system, clergy were assigned to churches by a bishop who presided over a regional jurisdiction. While clergy were expected to move about within that jurisdiction, it was unusual for them to move between states or even across the country. And it was still less likely that clergy would move to another country to do missionary work.

In 1919, when Houser was only three, his family pulled up stakes and moved from Lisbon, Ohio, where Otto was serving a church, to the Philippines, then a US colony. Otto assumed a post as pastor at a Methodist Episcopal church in Manila close to the University of the Philippines campus. Later, the family would move to Buffalo and Troy, New York; Berkeley, California; and Denver, Colorado. Houser’s lifelong interest in travel, his sense of adventure, and his ability to successfully operate across different cultures was shaped by this early peripatetic experience.

In an interview later in life, Houser said that he did not remember being conscious of race, and his parents seemed to keep it that way. They maintained long-lasting relationships with their Filipino parishioners and neighbors, while their home in the United States was always filled with African Americans and other non-Caucasians. This cross-racial amity was unusual in a time of strict racial segregation.¹

THE INTERWAR YEARS: THE MAKING OF A PACIFIST

Born just as America was entering World War I and coming of age just as the country entered World War II, Houser’s pacifist calling was to be shaped by these two great cataclysmic bookends. Horrified by the terrific loss of lives and treasure caused by World War I, Americans were in no mood for another war. Houser recalled as a child seeing gruesome photos of the death and destruction wrought by that war and feeling that this was “unthinkable.”² Isolationism was part of the zeitgeist in America and had been fed by a series of books and articles published in the 1920s and 1930s arguing that arms merchants had tricked the United States into entering World War I.³ Between 1935 and 1939 Congress sought to codify this isolationism, passing a series of five neutrality acts that repudiated all US involvement in foreign conflicts, including economic engagement with belligerents, even as hostilities were heating up in Europe and Asia.

Existing in tandem with isolationist sentiment was a large and active pacifist movement, which was mostly Christian in orientation. Deriving its inspiration from Jesus’s ethical teachings, the pacifist movement held that war violated Christian ethics and that Christians should not involve themselves in war or engage in any kind of violence. The general idea that emerged in the pacifist movements of the 1920s and 1930s was that of noncompliance with the war system.⁴ The organizations that exemplified this orientation included the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), founded in Cambridge, England, in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I; the historic “peace” churches—the Mennonites, the Quakers, and the Brethren; the Catholic Worker Movement, founded in 1933; and the secular War Resisters League, founded in 1923. All of these groups shared an optimistic egalitarian vision of social change that included work for civil rights and civil liberties (the FOR had been one of the organizers of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, now the American Civil Liberties Union), cooperative economics, and an anti-imperialist outlook.

No individual exemplified this combination of the abhorrence of war with a commitment to socialist-leaning politics more than the Reverend A. J. Muste. Dubbed the “American Gandhi,” he would become the most influential mentor in Houser’s life.⁵ Although the pacifist organizations were independent of the mainstream religious bodies, Muste wrote that by 1924 “there was a great upsurge of pacifism in the churches”: “It came to be recognized as something which had a rightful place—even an indispensable function—in the Christian churches, and not only in the peace churches. The right of conscientious objection was recognized and the duty of the church to give moral backing to its COs.”⁶

THE SOCIAL GOSPEL AND AMERICAN RADICALISM

The optimistic social outlook expressed in the pacifist movements drew from a larger cultural influence—that of the Progressive Era, a term generally applied to the period between 1890 and 1920. Though the term refers to a wide range of political tendencies and beliefs, Progressives were generally reformers who repudiated social Darwinism and believed that these conditions could be overcome through the provision of social services for the poor, government regulation of business, electoral reform, public education, and conservation of natural resources. While the Progressive Era was thought to have ended with World War I, its optimistic view of human nature and social change continued to live on in a movement within the mainstream Protestant denominations known as the Social Gospel movement. Originating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this movement had its most significant impact on American churches in the 1920s and 1930s; the movement was also instrumental in steering Protestant Christianity away from individualistic notions of sin and salvation and toward the struggle for a more humane social order.

Social Gospelers took their reading of Jesus’s ethical teachings into the streets, the labor halls, the settlement houses, and sometimes politics in an effort to reform American society and establish the “Kingdom of God” in the structures of the socioeconomic-political order. In concert with its secular counterparts, the Social Gospel movement called attention to poverty, urban distress, and the harsh conditions of working people and immigrants: the movement generated support for reforms similar to those enacted in New Deal legislation. Indeed, several New Dealers had been brought up in families imbued with the Social Gospel.⁷ Early Social Gospelers were also among the leaders of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the NAACP. By 1932 a “Social Creed” was adopted as the official statement of the Federal Council of Churches, which represented most of the mainline Protestant denominations.⁸

THE GREAT DEPRESSION: A LESSON IN DISSENT

The interwar years were characterized not only by isolationism and abhorrence of war but also by the Great Depression and the social turbulence it engendered.⁹ Young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four were perhaps hardest hit by the Depression. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of youth were unemployed. Youth from lower-income families had few educational opportunities, and of course for African American youth such socioeconomic problems were exacerbated. Even college-educated youth had trouble finding work. And as the Depression deepened, increasing numbers of those who could have gone to college saw their student loan funds and parental support dry up. As a clergy family enjoying a guaranteed appointment by the church, the Housers escaped unemployment in the 1930s. George’s father had to take a cut in salary but somehow managed to send his son to college. Nevertheless, Houser’s lifelong frugality probably stemmed from this experience as it did for so many others who lived through the Depression.

The economic crisis led students like Houser and many others of his generation to question both the logic and value of American capitalism and its connection with the war machine. The result was the growth of the first mass student movement in the United States.¹⁰ According to one of its biographers, “The student rebels of the Depression era rank among the most effective radical organizers in the history of American student politics.”¹¹ Unlike their counterparts in Germany, they appealed to the better angels of our nature, encouraging students to identify with the working class, to value a more just distribution of income and wealth, and to oppose racism. Knowing that their generation would be called on to fight the next war, these activist students became more intensely involved than any other segment of the population with foreign policy and with the need to avoid foreign military entanglements.¹²

In its broadest form the movement was composed of several different factions: a democratic-socialist faction that tended to be more liberal than socialist, a socialist faction that was aligned with the Socialist Party, a Communist faction, and a Student Christian Movement (SCM) that had grown out of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).

Three influences from abroad were also at work on Houser’s generation. In 1933 Oxford University students had created the “Oxford Pledge,” committing students to refuse to fight “for King and country.” The pledge received immediate headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, and soon American students had their own version of the Oxford Pledge, in which students would “refuse to support the government of the United States in any war it might undertake.” By autumn 1933, this pledge had been taken by students at antiwar conferences across the United States. During its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the student movement mobilized at least five hundred thousand collegians (about half of the American student body) in annual one-hour strikes against war. It was the first mass student protest movement in American history. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining rights.

A second foreign influence on some students in the 1930s was the example of the Communist experiment in the Soviet Union. Here they had a living demonstration of an alternative to capitalism. Some of the most effective student leaders were either in the Communist Party or were sympathetic to its causes, although probably only a minority of students gravitated to the Communist Left.¹³ A less radical alternative was available in the Socialist Party and its youth arm: the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). Even if one were not a card-carrying member of the YPSL, socialism as the vision of a more democratic, self-governing society was in the air. Houser and other students freely used the term “socialist” to describe themselves.

Finally, a third influence from abroad on students of the 1930s was the example of Mohandas Gandhi, who demonstrated that nonviolent civil disobedience could be an effective method for bringing about positive social change. During the early 1930s, articles about the Gandhian movement in India appeared almost daily in the major newspapers, and in 1934 Richard Gregg, the son of a Congregationalist minister and a lawyer who had spent seven months in Gandhi’s ashram in India, published The Power of Non-violence, a systematic discussion of Gandhian nonviolent direct action techniques showing how they were an effective and practical method of social change.

The Student Christian Movement (SCM) shared many similarities with the Social Gospel movement and was made up of mainline Protestant campus ministries and organizations that were linked to one another and to their partners overseas through the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), which was one of the earliest manifestations of the ecumenical movement and the oldest international student organization.¹⁴ As early as 1913 race relations emerged as an issue within the SCM. Following World War I, pacifism and economic justice emerged along with concerns about racism. With its emphasis on student leadership in the service of a peaceful and just human community, the SCM would groom many young people for leadership roles in progressive movements worldwide. Among those who received this training were Houser and several people he would work with over the coming years.

Similar to the ecumenical SCM, and in some cases loosely associated with it, were denominational student movements that had been established by the mainline denominations. The Methodist Student Movement (MSM) was the most radical. As the son of a Methodist Episcopal clergyman, Houser became deeply immersed in the MSM, attending institutes in his high school and college years where Social Gospel evangelists like Sherwood Eddy and his secretary, United Church of Christ clergyman Kirby Page, were invited speakers. Both Eddy and Page had founded the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order in 1921, a Christian socialist organization with a strong pacifist orientation. Both were prolific writers and lecturers whose reputation spread well beyond the United States.

Sherwood Eddy was also the interwar era’s foremost exponent of a new kind of Christian internationalism. Early in the century, Eddy had been an itinerant missionary working for the YMCA among social outcasts and the poor in India. Later, as traveling secretary of the YMCA, he worked with students in Asia, South Asia, and Russia. During the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most influential international leaders in American Protestantism. Eddy wrote thirty-seven books and numerous articles that were widely read by young people in the ecumenical movements, and he spoke to students across the world. He also brought to his American audiences an awareness of the larger world, albeit a world that needed the “modernizing” influences of the West.¹⁵ He affirmed the “legal right of the state to declare war and to pass a law conscripting the man power and the money power of the nation against ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. A Man of Many Parts, 1916–38
• 2. No Turning Back, 1938–41
• 3. They Wrote a New Page in the History of America, 1941–49
• 4. Hooked by Africa, 1949–54
• 5. An African Odyssey, 1954
• 6. A Mission the Size of a Continent, 1954–59
• 7. The End of Euphoria, 1960–68
• 8. A David against Goliath, 1968–73
• 9. Some of the Toughest Battles Still Lie Ahead, 1974–80
• 10. One Step Enough for Me, 1980–2015
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index