Female Speaker: My name is Mary Lee Krieger and on behalf
of the Kluge Center of the Office of Scholarly Programs,
I want to welcome you to today's presentation
by Dr. Joseph Kosek entitled, "God and Gandhi:
The Radical Spiritual Politics
of the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, 1879-1964."
Dr. Joseph Kosek holds a Ph.D. in American studies
from Yale University and among the fellowships he received
to support his dissertation work was one from the Institute
of the Advanced Study of Religion in Yale funded
by the Pew Charitable Trust, to focus on the role of religion
in American life and history.
Dr. Kosek obviously makes a good use of the funds,
because in 2005 the Society
of American Historians awarded him the Allan Nevins Prize,
which honor is given annually for the best-written dissertation
in the field of American history.
Joseph Kosek, or Kip as we have come to know him, has been published
by The Journal of American History, American Studies, the Peace Review,
The Alabama Review, and his manuscript progress currently titled
"Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence
and American Democracy" is under contract
to Columbia University Press and should be to print later this year.
Kip is an assistant professor in the American studies department
at George Washington University here in Washington, D.C.,
and we welcome his colleagues today who have come to attend the talk.
We've come to know what a fine midwestern scholar you're working
with day to day.
And in today's talk, Dr. Kosek will localize his study of the role
of religion in U.S. history to an examination
of the Unitarian minister and pacifist, a co-founder of the NAACP
and the ACLU, John Haynes Holmes.
In an historic moment, when it is a challenge
to even fully define what constitutes violence to the body,
mind and spirit of individuals and societies, Kip presents to us a man
who has wrestled with that issue.
I am eager to hear what he has to say and very pleased to present
to you today's speaker, Dr. Kip Kosek.
[applause] Kip Kosek: Thank you, Mary Lou.
I need to first thank all the staff of the Kluge Center
that has made my stay here so productive and enjoyable.
Those things don't necessarily always go together,
but here they did.
I need to thank my colleagues, the other fellows who shared
so many ideas with me over these last several months.
And I need to thank my research assistant from the fall,
Greg Miller, who tracked down a lot of obscure documents
in the far corners of the Library.
And I should congratulate you all for finding Dining Room A today.
Today I'm going to discuss religion and politics,
a pairing that we've heard a lot about and will no doubt continue
to hear a lot about in the months to come leading
up to the November elections.
Most of what we've heard in this election season,
and for the last 30 years, has been about the Republican Party
and conservative Evangelicals, the religious right,
as it's sometimes called.
But this religious right isn't the only way that religion
and American politics have mixed.
Religious people have also supported progressive politics,
liberal politics and even radical politics forming what we might call
very loosely and simplistically a religious left.
Many people would associate this religious left
with Martin Luther King, with black preachers
of The Civil Rights Movement and a few people will know names,
such as Dorothy Day or William Sloane Coffin.
But I think out historical knowledge of this phenomenon is rather thin
and piecemeal, so I want to provide today some of that missing history
to suggest that there is, in fact, a long American tradition here.
A tradition that includes Martin Luther King, includes the '60s,
but is much longer and bigger than that.
Whether we want to carry on this tradition, or modify it
or even fight against it, I think we ought to understand it.
And it's that understanding that I want to work for here.
To help us think about the history of this religious left,
I've chosen to focus on one exemplary individual,
John Haynes Holmes, the longtime minister
at Manhattan's Community Church.
I do this not because I think that history is driven by the heroic acts
of great men, but because I think Holmes opens up a wide view
of this religious left, this other tradition of spiritual politics.
And I also chose him because his papers are here at the Library
of Congress and really have a wealth of insight if you're interested
in these subjects, into all kinds of aspects of American politics,
and religion and reform movements.
Today, though, I'm going to talk about Holmes' belief in pacifism,
his belief in nonviolence.
This is part of a larger project, as Mary Lou mentioned.
A book that I've been finishing this year
about what I call Christian nonviolence,
a strain of religious radicalism that's long been dismissed
as marginal, eccentric and possibly otherworldly or saintly.
Against these dismissals, I'm going to try to convince you
that modern nonviolence was a powerful attempt,
an important attempt, to try to reckon
with the horrific mass slaughter of the 20th century,
an attempt that we need to take seriously, even those of us
who are not absolute pacifists as Holmes
and the other figures in my book were.
I want to look in particular at the first half of the 20th century,
a time that historian Niall Ferguson has suggested that we consider
as one long, bloody war of the world, in a book of that title
that he recently published.
It was a period when possibly more people were killed by other people
than in any comparable span in human history,
something we sometimes forget.   It's against that sobering backdrop
that Holmes championed religious nonviolence.
It's true that John Haynes Holmes is not much remembered today.
There's essentially no biography of Holmes.
He's mentioned sometimes in histories of American liberalism
or reform, but usually in passing.
Maybe the most telling evidence of our collective failure
to remember Holmes is his entry in Wikipedia,
which is only one very meager paragraph.
So if nothing else I'm going to convince you regardless
of your political or religious persuasion that this neglect
by a leading repository of knowledge in our time is an outrage.
Okay. Holmes was born in 1879.
He's a little bit older than Franklin Roosevelt.
He's a little bit older than Benito Mussolini.
He was born in the same year
as Joseph Stalin, to kind of orient you.
And I think it's worthwhile, these people were all born
in about four years of each other, and it's worthwhile thinking
of them together, I think, as people who all in some ways helped create
or responded to this war of the world
that Niall Ferguson was writing about.
And Holmes' career kind of parallels the careers of Roosevelt, Mussolini
and Stalin, these far more eminent figures.
At least he has to respond to some of the same forces
that they're responding to.
The Holmes family was old-stock American family,
traced its roots back to the 17th century.
Holmes attends Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School; he's part,
in some ways, of an East Coast elite.
He believed in his early years in progress and in European culture
as the height of civilization.
And one of the things I'll talk about is how that belief
in progress erodes over time.   The specific kind of Christianity
that Holmes practiced was Unitarianism.
I don't want to get too much into matters of high theology
because I want to talk about religious politics,
but it's important to know a little bit about what Unitarians believe.
They believe that religion ought to be rational,
that religion was progressive.
They were skeptical of many of the elements of orthodox Christianity,
elements that they regarded as superstition.
They were called Unitarians because they rejected the doctrine
of the Trinity, the idea that god was three in one, right,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Unitarians thought that that was quite irrational,
it didn't make any sense to have a Holy Spirit fluttering around,
right, so they were Unitarians.   God was a unity; God was one.
They didn't believe that God had created the world in six days
or that Jesus fed a multitude of people with five loaves of bread
and two fish or that the Bible was completely free from error
in matters of history or science or ethics.
They believed that these things were superstition
and that modern people would improve religion, would gain new insights
into the spiritual world.
This was the outlook that Holmes had, the view that he took
to in our own time, the view that he took to New York City's Church
of the Messiah, when he became the minister there in 1907,
in which he renamed the Community Church after World War I.
I'll call it the Community Church for simplicity's sake.
Eventually, Holmes tried to move even beyond Unitarianism.
He claimed that he was looking for a more kind
of expansive and universal religion.
But I see him as really keeping these fundamental Unitarian
assumptions about religion, about the spiritual world.
It's also important to know that Holmes grew
up in an environment suffused with the memory of abolitionism, okay?
The memory of the anti-slavery cause.
He was named after his abolitionist grandfather, John Haynes,
who was an associated of Theodore Parker, who some of you will know
as the radical anti-slavery Unitarian minister.
And Holmes considered himself in some way
to be the spiritual air of Parker.
And you can find in the Holmes papers these snapshots
of Holmes standing proudly by the grave of Theodore Parker
in Italy when Holmes visit there.
So he really thought he was in some sense carrying
on this legacy of abolitionism.
That's why he was a founder in 1909 of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.
The NAACP had an integrated founding leadership, and Holmes was one
of the white people involved.
Holmes also had an integrated church, which he boasted about.
It was mostly white, but it had people of, Holmes said, all races.
Holmes also got interested in the social gospel early in his career.
The social gospel, this movement that begins in the late 19th
and early 20th century demanding that Christians work
to alleviate the social problems of urban life,
of the new industrial capitalism, of immigrant poverty.
This was establishing the kingdom of God on earth and, in some ways,
was as important, maybe more important,
than converting individuals, than personal salvation.
Holmes made his own contribution to the social gospel bookshelf
with his 1912 book, which is called The Revolutionary Function
of the Modern Church.
And in that book he insisted that Jesus "was not only a prophet
of religious truth, but an instigator of social reform."
And Holmes also maintained a membership
in the American Socialist Party as an expression of this
with for social transformation, political transformation.
So religion was not just rational and intellectual,
which it kind of tended to be with Unitarians.
But Holmes also had this passion, this passion for social justice.
And it was a passion that was also clear in his preaching.
The hardest thing, I think, for us to recapture, this oral component,
the importance of public speaking in the first half of the 20th century.
But by all accounts, Holmes was an extraordinary speaker.
Accounts of his sermons often made The New York Times,
sometimes on the front page, as The New York Times did
with other prominent ministers, too.
Howard Moore was one of the people who visited Holmes' church.
Moore was a World War I conscientious objector,
not particularly well known, a pacifist,
and he described Holmes this way.
He said of Holmes, "He spoke without a manuscript,
and usually for a full hour, holding the congregation spellbound
with what always seemed to me less
like a sermon than a gripping drama."
Now Moore didn't even really consider himself religious.
He just liked to go and hear Holmes,
and I sometimes think the United States is not
so much a religious country as a country
that loves religious controversy.
And Holmes could provide that religious controversy
and that political controversy week after week
in ways that I'll talk about.
So this was John Haynes Holmes early in his career, an educated man,
a cultivated man, a supporter of the social gospel
and the progressive movement, and a dynamic preacher.
One of the many causes that Holmes championed was the cause
of international peace and disarmament.
It wasn't a huge concern; it wasn't a central concern;
it didn't necessarily seem as immediate as crowded tenements
or corrupt New York City politics, which Holmes was also involved in.
After all, progressives like Holmes figured that war was withering away
in the modern world, right?
People were becoming more interconnected,
people were becoming more enlightened.
Holmes preaches a sermon in 1910, which is titled simply "The Progress
of Mankind Onward and Upward Forever," okay?
A sign of his kind of early view.
Well the outbreak of the Great War, as it was called then, in 1914,
cast doubt on this confident narrative of civilization ascending.
And there was more doubt when the United States itself joined the
conflict in 1917.
"It was a progressive war," President Woodrow Wilson emphasized,
"A war to make the world safe for democracy."
And most progressives, most believers in the social gospel,
turned to support Wilson.
For a lot of Christians, the war could be
in its own tragic way another means of bringing
about the kingdom of God on Earth.
But for Holmes and for a small number of other dedicated pacifists,
including Jane Adams, Wilson's decision was devastating.
Hadn't everyone agreed that war was foolish,
war was unprogressive, war was un-Christian.
Holmes later recalled, and Adams has similar sentiments,
that he felt "a loneliness which was chilling to my blood."
Yet he determined to stand by his pacifist convictions.
And so the day before Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war,
when this is eminent, Holmes preached an incendiary sermon.
"If war is right," he said, "then Christianity is wrong, false, a lie.
If Christianity is right, then war is wrong, false, a lie."
Not just war, but this war.
Holmes went on, "Other pulpits may preach recruiting sermons;
mine will not.
Other clergymen may pray to God for victory, for our arms; I will not."
The New York Times covered the sermon on the front page.
Holmes had drawn a line.
Some of the congregants left the church, others joined,
the trustees had a secret meeting to try
to determine whether he should be fired for this
as many ministers were who spoke out against World War I.
But they decided, quite remarkably, that Holmes would keep his job,
so they stressed that they disagreed strongly with his views.
And there was this kind of, I think, Unitarian sense, belief in reason,
discourse and a reluctance to impose an authority
or an orthodoxy from above.
That seems to be consistent with Unitarian theology.
So Holmes continued to preach against the war,
having been granted this reprieve, for the next year and a half.
I think that he decided in these years that the problem
in the 20th century was the problem of violence.
He joined new pacifist organizations,
such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
which I talk more about in my book.
In some ways there wasn't a lot he could do.
It's hard to stop a war when you're in it, as all sides are finding,
right, with the Iraq war.
But Holmes began to take a broader view of violence and nonviolence.
For instance he helped start the American Civil Liberties Union,
the ACLU, new organization that emerges out of the war.
What does the ACLU have to do with war?
A lot of the ACLU's first cases are defending conscientious objectors,
defending opponents of war who had been victims of mob violence.
So when we think about the tradition of religious nonviolence,
it's not just about stopping soldiers in battle
or protesting wars, but it covers this range of issues.
In this case free speech, anti-war speech,
because free speech was being met with violence.
And for Holmes it came to be understood that this was part
of what it meant to believe in nonviolence was to fight
for free speech and for civil liberties.
Well the war ends in 1918 and in the next year or two, it becomes clear
that this was not the war to end all wars, as Wilson had claimed.
The effort to create an international system
to secure peace is defeated, and Holmes
and his fellow pacifists claim a certain measure of vindication,
but they're also changed, they're radicalized.
They remember that sense of loneliness, and they now feel
that they have to work urgently to prevent another great war.
It's a new priority a new shift for the social gospel, which had been
so focused on the problems of urbanization,
immigration, industrialization.
To promote this new cause, Holmes supported the outlawry movement,
what was called outlawry, the attempt to outlaw war by means
of international agreements.
He saw this cause in Abolitionist terms, and he said to skeptics,
"Look, people used to think that slavery was eternal,"
couldn't be eradicated, right, and yet we know slavery was eradicated
and therefore we can do the same thing with war,
which is the common sense of our time but which might be outlawed,
might be abolished, okay?   A new abolitionist cause.
This was not just kind of crackpot, pacifist idealism.
In 1928, the world's great powers, including the United States,
committed themselves to a treaty called the Kellogg-Briand Pact,
mostly forgotten today, promising never to wage war.
And though it is forgotten today, the outlawry movement was, I think,
an important precursor to the kinds of international mechanisms
that some governments and human rights advocates are trying
to create still in our own time.
Nevertheless, I think that most of our would agree that the idea
of outlawing war at the time was a little lacking.
It was a big inadequate to the threats that became so powerful
in the 1930s: the threat of fascism, the threat of communism.
This is why Holmes doesn't have a long Wikipedia entry, right?
What about Hitler?   What about Pearl Harbor?
Pacifism didn't seem to have the muscle to tackle those threats,
and so most people have simply dismissed it out of hand.
I'll get to those threats in a few minutes, but first I want
to give Holmes his due by broadening our view a bit.
The real innovation in fighting violence during the interwar period
was not the outlawry of war movement,
as promising as that may be in certain ways.
But the real innovation was Gandhi and nonviolence,
which was very unlike the outlawry movement, with its emphasis
on high diplomacy and international treaties.
Gandhi and nonviolence profoundly shaped the 20th century world
in a way that outlawry never did.
And it did that through its emphasis on the moral and spiritual aspects
of politics, through an emphasis on decentralized organization
that gave power to ordinary people through the use of mass media
and mass spectacle, and through and opposition to the violence
of colonialism and color line and not just a focus on war in Europe.
With Holmes' interest in ending violence, in ending racism
and in adapting religion to the modern world,
it made sense that he was one of the first Americans
to take a serious interest in the career of Mohandas Gandhi.
In 1921, Gandhi is first becoming known globally, you know,
first becoming Gandhi, due to the success
of his first noncooperation campaign.
And in that year, Holmes preaches a sermon called,
"Who is the Greatest Man in the World Today?"
Again, a flare for the dramatic here,
if you saw that on the marquis you might go in
and see who is the greatest man.
And Holmes said that the greatest man
in the world today was Mohandas Gandhi.
"When I think of Gandhi," Holmes said, "I think of Jesus Christ."
Here and in his other sermons, Holmes saw Gandhi
as a religious revolutionary, the latest in a lineage
of spiritual innovators that included not just Jesus,
but Buddha, Muhammad and Tolstoy.
Gandhi's eclectic beliefs in some ways made him a kind
of ideal Unitarian, right?
Embracing a broad, inclusive spiritual vision that was incarnated
in ethics, in the quest for social justice.
And indeed it was crucial that Gandhi was not all lofty ideas.
His ideas worked, as Holmes saw it.
Gandhi had tried nonviolence and succeeded,
succeeded against the most expansive empire in the world
and the supposed defender of Western civilization.
To promote Gandhi's ideas, Holmes did some things that seem
at first to be pretty unexciting.
But let's remember where we are in the first half of the 20th century.
How do you find out about a political leader
in a colonized nation halfway across the world who often communicates
in a language other than English.
In all seriousness, there are no Wikipedia searches, right?
You can't do a Google search.
It's very hard to get a transpacific flight.
There are newspapers,
but how controlled are those by the colonial power?
We're very aware being in this place, the Library of Congress,
of the way that ideas are not just abstract thoughts in our heads,
but things that circulate in books, in lectures,
in now but not then on the Internet.
So Holmes did some things that sound simple but quite important
at this very early stage to circulate the ideas
of this guy halfway across the world.
He preached these, he preached sermons,
such as the one I just mentioned.
He wrote articles in the Unitarian journal that he edited, Unity,
and in pacifist journals, such as The World Tomorrow,
in African American journals such as The Crisis, whose editor,
W.E.B. Du Bois, has also became very interested in Gandhi.
Holmes actually met Gandhi in London in 1931 and after
that he could speak firsthand about this remarkable world leader.
Most notably, Holmes republished Gandhi's autobiography, serially
and unity, during the 1920s.
It's incredible to say in this age of instant access,
but this was the only full-length version
of the autobiography published in the United States
until after Gandhi's death, the only one in the 1920s
and the 1930s and most of the 1940s.   Holmes also collaborated
with Gandhi's English friend Charles Andrews in publishing a kind
of weird abridged and edited version of the autobiography in 1930.
But those were your options if you wanted
to read this now classic text.
Unless you could get a copy from overseas,
that's how central Holmes was in, at this, at this very early moment.
But in addition to what he did personally,
Holmes also made the community church into a center for Gandhi
and inquiry and his parishioners themselves,
many of them were pioneering American Gandhians.
One of the most notable of these was a man named Haridas Muzumdar.
Muzumdar had been an associate of Gandhi in India and when he came
to the U.S. he very self-consciously tried to present Gandhi
in American and Christian terms.
In 1923, he wrote what I think is the first biography of Gandhi
to be published in the United States and he called it Gandhi the Apostle,
using this kind of Christian term.
And the next year Muzumdar published in the U.S. a book
that Gandhi had written and given the title Hind Swaraj,
one of Gandhi's early works,
which translated roughly "Indian self rule."
But when Muzumdar published it, he didn't call it Hind Swaraj;
he didn't call it Indian Self Rule.
He came up with his own new title, which was Sermon on the Sea.
And Muzumdar said this was a very appropriate title
because Gandhi had written part of the book while he was traveling
on a ship, so he was on the sea.
But, of course, he's also very clearly evoking the sermon
on the mount here and trying to connect someone
who Americans didn't know, Mohandas Gandhi, to someone who they --
at least they thought they knew a little bit about, Jesus, right?
So quite interesting things going on, not just with Holmes,
but with the people in his congregation who he attracted.
Muzumdar dedicated Gandhi the Apostle
to John Haynes Holmes calling him "my spiritual mentor."
And for his part Holmes sold Gandhi the Apostle
at the book table in the Community Church.
So Holmes' church was the place to go.
One of the places to go to find out about Gandhi, to talk to people
who had met Gandhi, to buy books about Gandhi so you could read
about just what this guy halfway around the world was up to.
What I'm saying is that if we restrict ourselves to thinking
about European diplomacy, Holmes is maybe not that significant.
He didn't have the answer necessarily for how to stop Hitler,
though I add that nobody else did either.
The outlawry movement didn't work very well.
But if we take a broader view, a truly global view,
then Holmes' legacy is perhaps more interesting.
He contributed to a network, an interracial, transnational network,
a network that included African Americans such as W.E.B Du Bois,
that included Indian emigrates such as Haridas Muzumdar,
and many other people as well; a network dedicated to working
out a new kind of alternative to violence.
We don't know what would have happened
if this network had been allowed, had been able to develop unimpeded,
but it didn't develop unimpeded.
And in the second half of the 1930s, of course,
a new war threatened the world.
The promise of Gandhi and nonviolence seemed
to evaporate amid the growing threat of fascism.
Holmes was 60 years old when the war began in Europe,
but he had to endure yet another crisis.
Holmes was, from the beginning, a staunch anti-fascist.
As early as 1934, he wrote that "the deeds of the Nazis are a betrayal
of all that glorifies and vindicates mankind."
In other words, Holmes did not oppose U.S. intervention
out of ignorance.
It wasn't that he didn't know how bad Hitler was.
He had met refugees from Germany.   He knew as much as any American did
about the persecution of German Jews.
He knew about the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1935,
where an international fascist coalition supported General Franco
against a socialist government.
And Holmes argued that the leader of the socialist party,
Norman Thomas -- and he threatened to resign
if the party offered military aid to the left in Spain.
And this is another thing you can find in the Holmes paper,
these letters going back in forth in Holmes' papers here.
War, for Holmes, was worst than fascism and for Holmes,
and for many other Americans in the 1930s,
fascism was less a foreign military threat.
Hitler was going to come over and invade our country
than it was a stick political threat.
We might have our own Hitler here; we might have our own fascism here.
And Sinclair Lewis writes this novel in the 1930s, right,
it can't happen here, about fascism, homegrown fascism coming to America.
So Holmes has this kind of rationale.
Holmes was also aware of the danger of war with Japan.
In 1935, he wrote an anti-war play called, "If This Be Treason."
I think, you know, working this close
to Broadway he couldn't help himself.
It did have a short run on Broadway.   It didn't do too well.
Reviews said basically you could tell it was written
by a preacher; it was a little preachy.
But the play was about a Japanese surprise attack on the Philippines
that brought the U.S. to the brink of war,
which was narrowly averted by a pacifist president.
So years before Pearl Harbor, Holmes,
like other well-informed Americans,
had thought about war again fascism and war against Japan.
But he still maintained his pacifist position and after Pearl Harbor,
he again told his congregation that he would not support the war,
that the war would not do any good, and he offered to resign
and again his offer was refused, and he kept his pulpit.
Here I'll confess I have trouble following Holmes.
I'm not completely convinced by his argument
that the United States should have stayed out of World War II,
but if I'm honest I have to admit that Holmes presents some problems,
some problems for people like me, people who tend
to think the U.S. was right to intervene.
And again, whether we want to carry on this tradition
of religious nonviolence or modify it or refute it,
we have to take it seriously and to understand it in context.
Holmes argued that the war was best explained
in terms of moral equivalents.
He did not think, although he was often accused of this,
that the allies were just as bad at the Nazis.
But he'd tend to see them and talk about them
in the same general terms.   He compared "Nazi barbarism" with
"British American imperialism" maintaining
that quote both would lead to future wars
as the first world war led to the second.
And Holmes viewed the second world war through the lens of the first.
After all it was a war from democracy in 1917.
It was a supposedly barbaric, German enemy in 1917,
and here we were, here we were again.
Holmes also saw the second world war through the lens of Gandhi,
who also opposed fighting in it.
Was British imperialism anywhere near as bad as Nazism?
I don't think so, but for someone who had followed Gandhi's career
so closely, who had come to see the British Empire from the perspective
of its colonized subjects, had come to see the British Empire in terms
of its conduct in India, the equivalents made a certain kind
of sense at the time, I think.
Holmes' view, then, was not that Hitler wasn't so bad,
although he could sometimes imply this in his weak moments,
but that the allies weren't so good.
They weren't so good that they could overcome the dehumanizing effects
of war.
And this takes us to the second part of Holmes' argument,
one that I find more powerful and more difficult to refute.
Not only Holmes argued did the combatants all subscribe
to equivalent ideologies of militarism and nationalism
and imperialism, but they all undertook acts
of unconscionable violence and brutality
in the conduct of the war itself.
Acts that made World War II the most destructive catastrophe ever
produced by human beings.
A catastrophe that killed some 60 million people
in one way or another.
Holmes and other pacifists held that the amoral logic
of warfare would always overwhelm the lofty ideals
for which any particular war was fought.
This point came up especially near the end of the war.
It came up in 1944 with the fire bombing of German cities,
particularly by British forces.
And it came up again with the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945.
Now on one hand the end of the war vindicated its supporters, right?
After all, we won, Nazism was destroyed and the liberation
of the concentration camps showed the depth of the evil
against which the United States had fought.
But Holmes, too, though that he had been proven right,
and for him the lessons of the war were to be found less at Dachau
and Buchenwald than at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The atomic bomb was a final proof to him that the combatants
in the war had all descended to the same level of inhumanity.
"It was not Hitler and his Nazi gangsters,"
Holmes wrote just after the war ended.
"Nor yet Mussolini and his fascist terrorists who rained
down this dreadful death upon mankind.
No, it was the leaders of the United States, Britain and Canada
who did this thing more ferocious than Hitler ever did.
It was good men, as the world recognizes goodness,
the custodians of civilization."
So a much more skeptical view here of civilization
than Holmes started with, right?
This was an outlandish thing to say, a wildly unpopular thing to say.
Some of us might think it was an immoral thing to say.
Holmes is almost saying, "Goddamn America" here, we might say, right?
But it was the logic of Christian nonviolence, the same logic
that led Holmes to oppose World War I, the same logic that led him
to condemn lynching and racial terror, the same logic that led him
to support Gandhi, the same logic led him
to this most radical critique of American power,
this most radical critique of the idea that there could be any
such thing as a just war.
Well, if the atomic bomb proved Holmes' point about war
in some ways, it also demonstrated the failure of religious nonviolence
to effect peoples' attitudes and actions.
In the rest of the 1940s marked a period of decline
for Holmes personally and for the radical spiritual politics
that he represented.
He did get to go to India in 1947 to meet Gandhi again just
after the country gained its independence.
And that's the picture on the flyers if you saw that coming in,
but that was a rare high point.
The next year, Gandhi was assassinated,
and Holmes was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease,
an ailment that led to his retirement from the pulpit
in 1949 at the age of 70.   From then on, he led a quieter life.
He wrote hymns.   He wrote a book about Gandhi.
He completed an autobiography called I Speak for Myself,
which Holmes never had trouble doing, which I recommend to you.
It's quite an interesting look at the man, but he was much less
in the public fray in the years preceding his death in 1964.
And the easiest way to tell this story is to say that it's the rise
and fall of John Haynes Holmes, the rise and fall
of the peculiar tradition of religious nonviolence.
Holmes made some good points, sure, but in the end we have to go to war
with the Hitlers of this world, and the Gandhis
of this world always end up murdered, right?
But think again about what was happening in the United States,
in the world, when Holmes died in 1964.
By that time, the cause of African American equality and the cause
of racial equality worldwide, which Holmes had championed
since the early years of the 20th century, since way back
when he helped started the NAACP in 1909.
That cause had gained astonishing success.
It was in 1964 that the Federal Civil Rights Act became law,
outlawing racial discrimination.
And that legislation owed a lot to Martin Luther King
and other civil rights leaders who had adopted the techniques
and the philosophy of Gandhi and nonviolence.
In the Montgomery bus boycott, in the sit-ins and in the march
on Washington the year before Holmes died.
And meanwhile abroad, anti-colonial movements often inspired
by Gandhi led to the independence of Africa and other colonized regions.
Holmes had never really worked out the details of how Gandhi
and tactics might be adapted in America, might be adapted
to African American freedom struggles
or how they might be adapted to African anti-colonial struggles.
But new generations built on the incomplete foundation
that he had laid as he helped created that network
of people and ideas years before.   Also in 1964, at the same time
that the civil rights movement was cresting,
another war was slowly escalating.
1964 was the year that Congress passed the Gulf
of Tonkin resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson
to use military force in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War would provoke an unprecedented anti-war movement.
Well, not quite unprecedented,
one that rivaled the substantial protesting against World War I
that Holmes himself had participated in.
And the questions that Holmes had asked about the relationships
between means and ends, about the tendency of war to corrupt good mean
and good causes, those questions would move, once again,
to the forefront of American politics in the late '60s,
in the years immediately following Holmes death.
And this time his arguments against war ended
up being much more widely shared.
So the issues that Holmes raised, I suggest, were not laid to rest
by World War II, not even laid to rest when he was in 1964
and have not been resolved in our own day with its urgent debates
over terrorism and torture and saving Darfur.
The problem of the 20th century, Holmes thought,
was the problem of violence.   As long as that remains our problem
in the 21st century Holmes' radical spiritual politics should continue
to challenge us.   Thank you.
[applause] And I think we have some time for questions and comments.
Yes? Male Speaker: I saw a citation to a debate that he had
with Scott Nearing in the early 1920s.
What were the contrasting views between Scott Nearing,
who was also a pacifist, of course, during World War I and John Holmes?
Kip Kosek: The question is about a debate that --
I'll try to repeat the question for the video.
The question is about a debate that Holmes had with Scott Nearing,
which I actually do know
about because I looked at it fairly recently.
But their debate was on the question,
"Can the church be radical?"
And it was, you know, at one level it was an example
of Holmes' performative qualities, right?
That he could, in fact, pack the church for a debate
on this question, which seems a little bit hard
to imagine today, right?
But he was that kind of magnetic personality and I think,
to some extent, Nearing was, too.
So there's a debate about did you need, you know, was religion helpful
in all of this, preventing war, you know,
bringing about these socialist world or not?
And they both agreed that most churches were not helpful
and were actually impeding the kinds of radical politics that Holmes
and Nearing both agreed on.
But Holmes was willing to allow that, the church,
some churches at sometimes could be radical, and that's part of his --
I mean, he's always on this search for religion
that he feels has the right kind of political and social values.
And that's why he goes to Gandhi who's really a kind
of counter-intuitive or not someone you'd expect
to any American Christian to champion necessarily, right?
But for Holmes he is.
And this continuing, I think, kind of lifelong attempt to find,
to look in, conduct this very wide search
and find these maybe unorthodox people who are, in some ways,
exemplary for this progressive religion.
Because Holmes believes that religion is progressive, right?
That we can make new innovations in the spiritual world.
It's a kind of liberal Protestant belief, right?
And Gandhi is one of the people who exemplifies this.
But he's always -- well he's sometimes,
in debate with other people who find religion
to be you know, why do we need it?   What good is it?
And I think this is quite a, an actually important
but not very well understood debate
in the period that Holmes is writing.
Female Speaker: How did your views about the potential for religion
to effect social change as you [unintelligible].
How did that play upon your own beliefs?
Kip Kosek: Oh, boy.   Well I started this project --
I mean I'll answer it a little more broadly.
I mean I started this project a few months before September 11,
so it has all been, you know I didn't -- it's not a --
I didn't do this in response to the war in Iraq, you know,
but it has all been shaped by that.
And certainly I think, I mean I glibly remembering telling my
colleague a couple weeks ago, "I think we've all become more pacifist
in the last five years," right?   But not matter what our views.
But I think that recent events have, in some sense,
made me more sympathetic to these views.
I think that when I started I had a view that the pacifists,
the kind of regular historical view, right,
that the pacifists are quite idealistic and otherworldly
and not really willing to deal with the hard realities of life.
And I don't think -- and that they're religion is in fact part
of what makes them kind of otherworldly and not willing to deal
with the hard realities of life.
But I think I've actually changed my mind about that.
I mean Holmes is often seen as one of the figures who's most idealistic
and Reinhold Niebuhr, who some of you will know, who's a supporter
of World War II, just can't stand Holmes
because he thinks he's just got his head in the clouds, you know,
and just you know this kind
of idealistic pacifist religion is just the worst thing.
But I don't -- I think that this kind
of nonviolence was actually much more, was much more realistic
and much ore practical than people give it credit for.
One of Holmes' friends, Richard Gregg, actually goes to India,
hangs out with Gandhi and really tries even more to write
about Gandhi and tactics and how Gandhism can be made more practical.
And he really, Gregg really has an influence
on The Civil Rights Movement.
Martin Luther King reads his book and so on.
So I guess that idea that this religious nonviolence actually had a
kind of a more practical and immediate value
than it's sometimes given credit for was what I found
over the course of doing this.
Female Speaker: You talked about how Holmes disseminated some
of Gandhi's ideas.
I'm interested in finding out what he actually thought about the ideas.
What ideas that Gandhi was posing
in this particular moment did he find most attractive, and why?
How did he perhaps things go to be translated
into the American conflict.
Because when you say that it seems counter-intuitive
that he was interested in Gandhi, it's actually intuitive.
If you read Gandhi's writings,
Gandhi [unintelligible] critical liberalism, liberalism in the sense
of being sort of an emphasis in secularity and secularism.
Because Gandhi thought that the problem with the idea
of liberalism was that it didn't allow for a recognition
of difference and that, you know, unless you allowed
for the difference, whether it's in race or religion, to be recognized,
that people can really come together.
Liberalism tends to erase difference, because the only way
that liberalists feel they can all come together is
as secular individual in a certain society [unintelligible].
So Gandhi's English writing, in particular, very,
very striking critiques of his idea of the liberalism,
which seemed to be that if Holmes was reading these --
And I shouldn't confuse how he could have read anything in 1921
because Gandhi was not even that well known
in India, he was up and coming.
So I'm interested also in that the actual sort
of transmission of Gandhi's ideas.
But you know as far as the ideas themselves are concerned,
I would think that Holmes would have been very attracted to this idea
of rethinking the notion of sort of secular liberalism.
You can bring religion in so that it could in fact be used
for public service and so on.   But, you know, other than that is
where people draw what ideas that Gandhi is.
Other than his tactics they have big notion that he sort
of was this nonviolent [unintelligible].
Kip Kosek: So let me talk a little bit more about what Holmes saw
in Gandhi or what Holmes thought of Gandhi's ideas.
Let's see, I mean I think you're right; there is a critique
of liberalism that they both there.
And especially, I mean it goes back to the Scott Nearing thing, right?
A critique of a kind of secular politics, right,
that Holmes is trying to make and that Gandhi seems
to give him license to do.
Holmes, you know, Holmes is really interested in Gandhi
as putting a religion or spiritual values into politics as kind
of incarnating this social gospel.
And he is often somewhat vague about it.
And I think though, you know,
you said what could he have read by Gandhi?
When Holmes preaches the sermon
"Who is the Greatest Man in the World Today?"
he basically admits, or maybe he admits it later,
that he's going on almost nothing.
I mean he's going on a few articles that he read.
And I mean I think Holmes at the beginning
at least invents a fair amount of what he thinks Gandhi is doing.
And there's certainly a lot about -- it's important to say there's a lot
about Gandhi that Holmes and a lot of other Americans are not
that interested in, right?   Gandhi's vegetarianism,
which attracts you know the dietary experience,
which attracts some people but not that many.
Not many Americans are interested in following Gandhi's promotion
of celibacy, probably the least popular Gandhian idea.
And so it's really important to say that the Gandhi
that Holmes has is a selective one, right?
And sometimes we are a little romantic
about transnational understanding, right?
Well there's transnational misunderstanding, too, right?
And selection.
But I think you're right to say that the critique of --
well, religion is important, Gandhi as a religious innovator, part of a,
part of again for Holmes a kind of global project to think
about the spiritual world, to improve religion
in some ways, that he's nonviolent.
And that, you know, I think it's important
that Gandhi is making this, I mean why he's so appealing,
he's in some ways critiquing the West,
or Western civilization using some of the West's own arguments, right?
That he's influenced by Tolstoy, he's influenced by Ruskin,
and he's influenced by some of the same people
who influenced John Haynes Holmes, right?
So another mistake we can make is a kind of what,
like racial essentialism, like Holmes is the West
and Gandhi is the third-world or the East or something like that.
But in fact, you know, they both read Tolstoy you know,
and the both probably read Ruskin and there is a real what?
A kind of common knowledge of English literature
and English philosophy, things like that.
That you're right, it's not completely counter-intuitive
that Holmes picks up on Gandhi.
It's somewhat -- in some ways it makes sense.
Female Speaker: I think it's [unintelligible] particularly
today [unintelligible].
Kip Kosek: Yeah Gandhi I mean is a really complicated figure
and has been mythologized in ways that probably don't quite accord
with what he was really discussing.
Male Speaker: What were Holmes' views
on Stalin and [unintelligible]?
Kip Kosek: Yeah, that's a good question,
Holmes' views on communism.
He starts, he's part of the anti-communist left.
I mean we usually think of anti-communism
as being a rightwing thing, right, Joe McCarthy with his,
"I Have a List," or you know Reagan and the evil empire,
but Holmes is really part of an anti-communist left.
And he starts out like a lot of Americans pretty interested
and even excited about the Soviet experiment, as it's called,
the Bolshevik Revolution.
And when he preaches, "Who Is the Greatest Man in the World Today?"
the runner up to Gandhi is Lenin.
Lenin is the second greatest man in the world today.
And I don't think Holmes means by that
like greatest man, like he's a great guy.
It's greatest in the sense of most important or momentous, right?
And through the '20s, he preaches sermons trying to say
to his somewhat skeptical congregation
that the Russian revolution probably is doing some good tings.
He really sours on it in the 1930s with the Moscow trials
and eventually the Hitler-Stalin pact, the non-aggression pact,
the temporary arrangement between Germany and the Soviet Union.
And he ultimately says, I mean he's still willing to believe things
which we know is maybe not quite true,
that the Soviets had produced this workers' republic,
this economic miracle.
But he ultimately says, you know, they have the same nationalism,
the same militarism, the same imperialism
that the so-called capitalist nations have,
and it's really no different.
So I mean one of the things I'm trying to do with this project is
to think about the varieties of American radicalism, and it's often,
one often hears about the old left in the 30s, and the red decade
and the popular front and those kinds of things,
but that kind of Marxist-Communist kind
of radicalism was not the only thing.
And I think Holmes is another, offers a different kind
of radicalism that shared some of those interests
but was also quite different.
Female Speaker: It's about one o'clock, so if you want
to take one more question.   Kip Kosek: Okay, one more.
Claudia, we'll do one from this side of the room, I think, okay?
Female Speaker: A lot of what you were saying about Holmes reminded me
of a similar argument
to what Hobsbawm makes in the age of extremes.
[Unintelligible] as a sort of violent comedown to Holocaust
in order to contrast the Holocaust
and given [unintelligible] Male Speaker: Could you speak up, please?
Female Speaker: Sorry.
Given the [unintelligible] ideological background and your quip
at the beginning about religious controversy, about that religion.
I was just wondering in the course of [unintelligible],
given that these two men make similar arguments
from obviously different backgrounds,
how much is Holmes actually using religion
in what he's doing, you know?   What differentiates his argument
from a straightforward, political one?
Kip Kosek: Hmm.
So what difference does religion make in Holmes' politics?
I mean this is a question that I've thought about a lot,
and that keeps me up late at night, you know, in various kinds
of existential or you know professional crises.
[laughter] You know, the way I've come to see it is that it's possible
to do some of the things that Holmes did and not be religious.
There are secular followers of Gandhi,
and there are secular you know people who opposed the atomic bomb.
But it does seem to me that this position of absolute pacifism
and Christian nonviolence is something that,
at least in this period, was disproportionately espoused
by these radical Christians and what I've come to think
of as kind of a Christian culture.
In other words, you could be secular and be in it, but it was dominated
by these Christian figures.   And I'm not sure why that is.
I have some ideas.
I mean certainly Gandhi talks about religion a lot in a way that,
you know, was somewhat distasteful to more like Marxists,
to a lot of Marxists, and was more amenable to radical Christians.
I also think in some ways that, and again this isn't an absolute thing,
but in some ways the religious focus on individuals
and on the individual person as being valuable, which is this thing
in Gandhi and nonviolence, right?
That it's the individual sitting in or boycotting the bus or whatever
that becomes important, right, beyond the kind of ideology
of Marxism or capitalism or socialism or whatever.
And I'm not say that this is the greatest kind of politics.
I mean some people will say this leads us to be overly sentimental
or overly focused on media spectacles or whatever,
but it does strike me that that's one thing that kind of focused
on the individual personality and the individual life.
It's one thing that makes Holmes
and radical Christians different from Hobsbawm.
And I think that they both make this argument, but they come at it
from different perspectives in a certain way.
Okay? Well, thank you.
Female Speaker: For those of you who are interested
in replaying all this, it's going to be on the Library's Web site.
I just want to say thank you to Kip.
There was a sentence I interrupted myself in the introduction
and that was -- I'll complete it now, saying, that, I think I speak
for all of your colleagues, we'll miss you when you're tenure
at the Kluge Center ends, Kip.   Thank you all for being here.
[applause] [music] [end of transcript]