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Richard Gregg, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Strategy of Nonviolence
Joseph Kip Kosek
| Shortly after the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–1956 established Martin Luther King Jr. as the nation's leading practitioner of nonviolent direct action, an official from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) asked him to name the books that had most influenced his thinking. King chose five texts. Four of them seem unsurprising: Mohandas Gandhi's autobiography, Louis Fischer's 1950 biography of the Indian leader, Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience, and Walter Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel classic, Christianity and the Social Crisis. The fifth book on the list, however, was Richard Gregg's 1934 The Power of Non-Violence, a text virtually unknown today among historians of modern America. Even major biographies of King, such as those by Taylor Branch and David Garrow, largely ignore Gregg. Yet he was the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance.1 |
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Militant nonviolence did not emerge in the United States as a response to racial segregation in the 1950s. Its central characteristics appeared during the interwar period, amid a worldwide crisis of democracy fomented by industrial conflict, economic instability, an increasingly precarious colonial system, and the ascendant threats of fascism and Communism. In this context, Richard Gregg became part of a small radical pacifist vanguard that went beyond mere opposition to international war to insist that the future of democratic societies depended on their members' absolute renunciation of violence as a means of social change or conflict resolution. As an alternative, members of pacifist organizations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL) began to experiment with social and political practices that they came to call nonviolent direct action, nonviolent resistance, militant nonviolence, or simply nonviolence. Then, during World War II, a new generation of pacifists and their allies took the project further, particularly through their work in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). By the time that King read Gregg's writings in 1956, the method of nonviolence had undergone decades of elaboration, revision, and occasional practical application. |
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The recovery of Richard Gregg's career opens a window on the early trajectory of nonviolent action as an intellectual, theoretical, and political project. Historians of the civil rights movement have shown how the idea and practice of nonviolence shaped the politics of such figures as King and Bayard Rustin, and some recent work has uncovered the important debates in the 1960s over the advantages and limits of nonviolence as a method. Historians of interwar pacifism have revealed the links between the American peace movement and a wide range of domestic reform initiatives.2 Still, neither civil rights historians, with their focus on racial equality, nor peace historians, with their stress on international relations, have adequately analyzed the complex roots of nonviolence, its moral and strategic innovations, and its historical significance. Gregg's eclectic career allows a more expansive view. Though he was a pacifist, his conception of militant nonviolence owed much to factors outside the peace movement, particularly his experience and observation of organized labor in America and anticolonialism in India. In his enduring belief in the centrality of labor, Gregg drew on the ethos of the Old Left, but his fear of a mechanized, centralized, and militarized society looked forward to the concerns of the New Left. Gregg's long personal and intellectual journey shows the enduring problem of violence and the elusive goal of nonviolence to be crucial not only to the history of pacifism and the civil rights movement but also to the general development of modern American dissent.3 |
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