American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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ideology of these labor pragmatists: ‘‘Presenting all facts about American labor—Believing that the goal of the American labor movement lies in industry for service, with workers’ control.’’ Its aim was to serve the labor movement by dealing ‘‘with the acts and thoughts of labor, without regard to dogma.’’79
Intellectuals, educators, and pacifists joined these progressive laborites in support of workers’ education. Boston’s Trade Union College could boast that its teachers included Felix Frankfurter and Harold Laski of Harvard University. The journalist Arthur Gleason was a particularly zealous backer, as were the historian Charles A. Beard and Bryn Mawr’s president M. Carey Thomas, both of whom had traveled to England where they had observed an active and flourishing movement. When they returned to the United States, Beard taught classes for the Rand School of Social Science and the ILGWU, while Thomas founded Bryn Mawr’s famous summer school for women workers. By the spring of 1921, there was enough sentiment to host a conference of two hundred supporters at the New York School for Social Research. Noting that at least twenty-six workers’ education ‘‘enterprises’’ serving some ten thousand students had been established in just two years, the conference voted to found the Workers’ Education Bureau (WEB) as a national clearinghouse for research, teaching, publication, and extension work in workers’ education.80
The movement’s nascent philosophy embraced the experimental, nondogmatic approach of progressive education, while rejecting its individualism. As one proponent put it, academics and liberals implicitly viewed education from a ‘‘middle-class point of view’’ with their tendency to ‘‘substitute ‘higher spiritual or cultural objectives’ ’’ for the ‘‘ ‘materialistic’ outlook’’ of workers and trade unions. Workers’ education, by contrast, aimed to educate workers to serve their unions and their class, not to educate them out of their class with bourgeois ideals of individualism and upward mobility.81 Reflecting this perspective, the curriculum of early workers’ education programs was largely limited to subjects considered directly useful to workers, such as the English language, trade union instrumentals, and the social sciences, which included sociology, economics, history, and some literature. At this early stage, literature and the arts were seen as something the workers already had access to as human beings, not as an additional ‘‘front’’ in the struggle for ‘‘a new social order.’’82
Still, enthusiasts of workers’ education remained on the political left. Unlike the conservative trade unionists they had battled for supremacy during the war, their ultimate goal was a socialist society, and they believed that workers’ education could help them achieve it. As Fannia Cohn of the ILGWU explained, workers’ education must be ‘‘flexible, experimental, and reflective of the interests of the groups involved,’’ while also having a ‘‘central ideology’’ of unifying the working class to achieve power.83 Labor educators were also tired of the factional squabbles of left and right and sought to make workers’ education independent of any political party or dogmatic creed, in contrast to the educational programs of the Socialist and Communist parties. As one early theorist explained, the movement was ‘‘positively partisan’’ in its commitment to strengthen the labor movement, but it would not ‘‘stereotype men’s thoughts, ideals and beliefs . . . substitute one dogma for another.’’ Clint Golden, a machinist who would serve as Brookwood Labor College’s field secretary in the 1920s, reiterated this distinction in a 1925 survey of the movement. ‘‘Where classes have been organized or conducted primarily for propaganda purposes [such as those offered by the Communist and Socialist parties] they have had but a brief existence. . . . Those efforts seem most directly and permanently felt which are pragmatically conducted—dealing with the individual problems with which the workers are confronted,’’ and allowing for ‘‘free investigation, examination and inquiry.’’84
As Golden’s comments suggest, pedagogically, this independence was expressed through a commitment to the ‘‘factual approach,’’ in which worker-students would be presented with a real, living problem and the data and tools necessary for solving it themselves. Historians have typically interpreted the social science language of ‘‘facts’’ and ‘‘neutrality’’ as a retreat from the values of advocacy and service that had animated the previous generation of intellectuals.85 But for enthusiasts of workers’ education, faith in the tools of the social sciences coexisted with a rejection of academic notions of objectivity and detachment. ‘‘There is a great deal of bunk current which suggests that . . . both or more sides must be presented for the students’ judgment. Mental gymnastics, however, is not education. . . . Teach students to think by all means, but thought must have a content and education a purpose.’’86 Students were given leave to participate in strikes and other labor activities, which were viewed as ‘‘laboratories’’ for testing the hypotheses and methods that they had explored in their classes. As Louis Budenz explained in the pages of Labor Age, ‘‘It is in the pragmatic field of the workers’ trench warfare that workers’ education will be worked out.’’87
The alliance between progressive unionists and intellectuals represented by the workers’ education movement shows that not all intellectuals retreated from their faith in the masses and social service after World War I, nor did all workers ascribe to the anti-intellectualism preached by Samuel Gompers.88 Indeed, the movement served as a residual expression of a once robust bond between workers and intellectuals, though laborites made it clear that intellectuals were there to serve the movement and ‘‘not as prophets.’’89
The origins of Brookwood Labor College reflect the developments outlined above. Its founders were Christian pacifists who had been converted to labor’s cause during World War I. The most important of these was William Fincke, a minister who had resigned his pulpit in opposition to the war. In the fall of 1919, he and his wife, Helen, decided to turn their country estate—complete with a mansion, ‘‘white and wooden-grand with high pillars and wide portico’’—outside of Katonah, New York, into a secondary school to promote their ideals.90 For a variety of reasons, the school never really got off the ground, and the Finckes, inspired by the example of Ruskin College in England, decided to reopen the school as a labor college.91
In the spring of 1921, they invited a small group of intellectuals, academics, and trade unionists to discuss the founding of a residential school for adult workers.92 As a pacifist, a socialist, and a trade unionist with working-class credentials, Muste provided the bridge between the various groups and quickly emerged as the most likely candidate to direct the school. At first, he only agreed to teach history, but the demise of the ATWA, his own growing interest in workers’ education, and the decision of the Finckes to leave Brookwood at the end of the summer of 1921 all pushed him to assume the chairmanship. It was like ‘‘screwing in the spark plug of an engine,’’ the Finckes’ son recalled of the recruitment of Muste.93
Personal factors also played a role in Muste’s decision. The years since he left Newtonville’s Central Congregational Church had been chaotic and insecure ones for his family. While he led the Lawrence strike, Anne remained in Boston, pregnant with their second child, Constance, who was born in August 1919. That same summer, Muste moved his family to New York City where the ATWA had set up its headquarters. In some ways, this was a more stable existence. As head of the union, he earned a regular salary, albeit much reduced from what he had received as an upstanding minister. Yet, despite these improvements, Muste was rarely at home and his involvement with the ATWA meant that he constantly faced arrest and even death. As Muste recalled of those years, ‘‘I do not recall a single week when there was not a strike on somewhere. . . . There was no strike without labor spies; no strike in which we did not encounter arbitrary, and usually violent, conduct on the part of the police; no strike, hardly a union meeting in those days, where raids by Attorney General Palmer’s men were not carried out or at least threatened.’’ Though he found these experiences decidedly stimulating, he began to feel as though he was ‘‘running out of ammunition,’’ with never a moment to pause for reflection. Brookwood thus offered some respite from the constant ferment of leading a persecuted union in decline.94
Two miles outside of Katonah in Westchester