I begin this chapter by telling you about a very pleasant enterprise, the resident college which has just been started by the labor education movement, the Brookwood School at Katonah, New York. Brookwood is a co-educational college, with a two years’ course and a year of post-graduate work. Its aims are set forth as follows:
Brookwood aims to train economists, statisticians, journalists, writers and teachers, organizers, workers and speakers, for the labor and farmer movements in order that these movements may have people coming from their own ranks, with their own point of view, who are fully capable by training and knowledge of exercising a genuine statesmanship.
Brookwood was organized by Toscan Bennett, a reformed corporation lawyer, and his wife, a reformed suffragette. They purchased a farm, with a beautiful old colonial building, and this summer, while I am writing a book, they are working on new dormitories—and I wish I might be there! If you want to find in this ugly and greedy world a place where the true spirit of comradeship prevails, where men and women, middle-aged and young, consecrate themselves with fervor, and also with fun, to the service of freedom and social justice, take my advice and pay a visit to Brookwood.
The clothing workers’ unions in New York and the coal miners in Pennsylvania furnish most of the pupils, and pay a part of their expenses. They are taught by the customary outfit of kicked-out college professors and school teachers. There is Josephine Colby, who organized the teachers of Fresno, California, and was separated from her position by a superintendent who stated in the newspapers that he didn’t believe in using arguments in dealing with union school teachers, the thing to use was a baseball bat. Also there is David Saposs, who was in a student revolt at the University of Wisconsin, when the working students organized and got the business manager of the university fired; as a result, Saposs was told that it would do him no good to get a degree, as he would not be recommended for a teaching position!
Also there is A. J. Muste, a reformed Quaker clergyman, who has received a quite unique training for his career as labor educator. I first heard of him as a theological student, through a little mimeographed circular, “Towards a New Preaching Order.” He and a group of three or four young men proposed to go out into the world in the old apostolic fashion, without scrip or purse, and bring capitalism to its knees by moral fervor. It was a most eloquent piece of writing, and I marked this young clergyman for a career. Next I heard of him in the Lawrence textile strike of 1919; his “preaching order” was trying its eloquence upon the president of the Woolen Trust, who came within an ace of going to prison, upon the charge of having had dynamite planted in the homes of non-union workers, as a means of discrediting the strikers. Mr. Wood did not yield to young Muste’s apostolic fervor; on the contrary, he had his Cossacks ride the young clergyman down on the sidewalk, and pound him over the head with their clubs and finally throw him into jail. So Mr. Muste preached to the strikers, and following the best apostolic precedents, started a soup kitchen for them, performing the miracle of the loaves and fishes with the help of checks from a few good angels scattered over the country. After he had got through with that strike, he was a trained labor scholar and ready to teach literature in a workers’ college!
Four years ago there were only two or three labor colleges in the United States, all of them in New York City; now there are six in the state of Pennsylvania alone. A bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor, published in June, 1921, “Education of Adult Working Classes,” lists twenty-four such institutions, in places as widely scattered as Washington, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth and Seattle. The auspices under which these schools are organized are: central labor unions, five; local unions, five; international unions, five; State federations, seven; Socialist and radical groups, one; the Women’s Trade-Union League, one.
Mr. Paul Blanshard, secretary of the Rochester Labor College, gives me an interesting account of one such institution, and the vicissitudes of a would-be teacher. Mr. Blanshard got his training in class-consciousness during the textile strike at Utica several years ago; he tried to start some classes for foreigners in English, and the interlocking newspapers took him up, and all Utica read that he was starting “a school in Bolshevism”! The Lusk committee went after him—on the testimony of a police captain who was later released from the force under grave suspicion; also of a detective in the employ of the Helen Ghouls. Mr. Blanshard, of course, was not given a hearing, and the scare headlines in the newspapers frightened away all his pupils.
But the Amalgamated Clothing Workers are powerful in Rochester, and are not so easily frightened; they joined with thirteen other unions to make a college for Mr. Blanshard to run. They make a contribution of one cent per month for each member, a total income of seven hundred dollars a year—which no doubt looks extremely small to Professor Egbert of Columbia University, which has seven millions a year. Nevertheless, on this income the college has weekly educational mass meetings, addressed by the livest men in the country, and attended by some fifteen hundred workers; it publishes a four-page educational bulletin every week, and has classes in unionism and public speaking, in English, in current events, in economics, and in labor problems.
That is a glimpse at one city; and you will find the same thing happening in all the others. In Portland, Oregon, the college meets in the Labor Temple, and the Central Labor Council assesses one-twelfth of its total revenue to save its brains for its own uses. In New York City two of the greatest unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, have established educational departments, and are carrying out elaborate programs for the benefit of their members. The I. L. G. W. U. has eight “unity centers” in New York public schools, with classes in English, the teachers assigned by the Board of Education. It arranges independent courses in the labor movement, economics, psychology, literature, music, health, etc. Its “Workers’ University” meets in the Washington Irving High School, with courses in about twenty subjects, and a registration of three hundred students. Also there is an extension department, which arranges for lectures, concerts, and classes of all sorts at the headquarters of the various local unions. There are branches of this enterprise in Cleveland and Philadelphia, and the whole thing is the growth of only four years.
In order to realize the deliberate dishonesty of Professor Egbert’s statement that “labor education has virtually broken down in America,” you should have attended a conference called by the Workers’ Education Bureau of America, organized in connection with the New School for Social Research in New York City, for the purpose of co-ordinating these labor colleges, and furnishing them with literature and text-books. This conference was held April 22 and 23, 1922, just one month before Professor Egbert’s three columns of treachery were featured in the New York “Times.” Here were eager delegates, teachers and students, addressed by speakers as wide apart in their views as Samuel Gompers, James Maurer, Charles A. Beard and Benjamin Schlesinger. I will list the subjects discussed at one of the sessions, dealing with “Teaching Methods in Workers’ Education”—this just to give you an idea of the breadth of view and practical grip of the movement: “The Forum,” “The Debate,” “School-room Methods,” “Discussion Methods,” “Health Education,” “Methods of Health Education,” “The Teaching of Economics,” “Journalism,” “Mass Education,” “Educational Aspects of Work,” “Correspondence Education,” “Text Books,” “Public Discussion,” “Trade Union Meetings,” “Problems of Adult Instruction.”