American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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in its review of the symposium.23 Two months later, Brookwood began a series of institutes on the topic of women and the labor movement; the first one focused on the plight of unorganized female workers.24 Soon thereafter, Brookwood hosted a two-day youth conference that involved representatives from twenty-two unions, rank-and-file members, and AFL officials on the question of how to organize young workers.25
The gist of these 1927 conferences was that these workers were not ‘‘problems’’ or obstacles to trade unionism, but rather had their own, distinct experiences that needed to be understood and adapted to if unionism was to flourish.26 These relatively progressive views on the black working class and women workers existed in tension with deeply held racial and gender ideologies. At the same time that Brookwood decried the existence of racial prejudice, the Brookwood Players performed a play that had coal miners dressed up like ‘‘horrifying African cannibals.’’ Moreover, as sympathetic as they could be toward the challenges facing black workers, Brookwood faculty, students, and alumni were often reluctant to confront racism because they feared it would weaken the labor movement as a whole.27 Similarly, despite challenging the myth that women just worked for ‘‘pin money,’’ the structure of Brookwood depended upon the unpaid labor of faculty wives, such as Anne Muste, even as they had little formal say in the school’s governance. More broadly, progressive unionists shared with their conservative brethren a construction of the worker as a white male and conflated organization with the attainment of full manhood.28
As the college became an intellectual center for labor progressives, it also became directly involved in a series of strikes that occurred over the course of 1926 to 1928. Brookwood’s policy had always been to release students for participation in strikes by their unions, but now the college organized as an institution to assist striking workers. This change reflected the growing conviction of Muste that education must ‘‘be applied in action,’’ not only in the classroom.29 Thus Brookwood provided crucial financing and publicity for strikes by New York’s garment and fur workers, miners in Pennsylvania and Colorado, midwestern hosiery workers, and especially textile workers. The Passaic strike of 1926 was like a miniature revival of the Lawrence strike of 1919, as liberals supported the rights of the strikers to free assembly and free speech. Muste and other Brookwooders helped organize the ‘‘Conference on Relief for the Passaic Strikers’’ to raise money and relief, while the Brookwood Players performed Shades of Passaic to a packed audience of strikers.30
At Brookwood’s second annual summer textile institute, held in 1928, Muste urged the UTW executive board to step up their efforts to organize the South. Alfred Hoffman spearheaded the organizing drive in the Piedmont region, along with the help of other Brookwood students.31 Meanwhile, closer to home, in Paterson, New Jersey, the Associated Silk Workers, an independent union, called a strike on October 10, 1928, for the forty-four-hour work week, a uniform piecework scale, and union recognition. As the strike dragged on for several months, Brookwood organized relief for the striking workers, while Muste organized merger negotiations between the independent union and the UTW. The decision to have Muste serve as impartial arbitrator ‘‘was the unanimous choice of both sides,’’ President McMahon of the UTW commented.32
Brookwood formalized its move ‘‘into the field’’ in 1928 with the formation of an extension department. Under the direction of Tom Tippett, a former miner, the college provided not only classes and lectures to workers throughout the United States, but also participated in organization campaigns and strikes. Brookwood considered these activities ‘‘not as interruptions of school work but as genuine education, and students and teachers alike bring wiser judgment and a keener sense of reality to their classes in consequence.’’33
As Brookwood assumed a more substantial presence in the labor movement, the AFL moved to quash any evidence of independence or dissent within the movement. Even though the college worked hard to avoid public criticism of the federation, the very nature of workers’ education—as conceived of by labor progressives—conflicted with an official labor movement seeking loyalty and control. On the one hand, Muste and other advocates of workers’ education stated their allegiance to the labor movement and their conviction that education would make the movement stronger. At the same time, they were adamant that they would teach their students how to think, not what to think.34 What this meant was that a variety of ideological and political perspectives found expression in workers’ education initiatives, including those that were in opposition to the official policies of the AFL. A memorial service Brookwood held for Gompers offers a case in point, as it included speeches by students who favored the nonpartisan policy of the AFL as well as by devoted Leninists. The affair prompted William Green’s secretary, Florence Thorne, to write to Muste: while she appreciated ‘‘your difficulties in meeting the various tendencies of your Brookwood group,’’ she wondered if the college might refrain from publicizing such events. ‘‘This would . . . help to keep the ideals and policies of Brookwood more in line with our American labor movement.’’ In his response, Muste admitted to the ‘‘unfortunate’’ juxtaposition of Gompers and Lenin, but reminded Thorne that the college’s policy was ‘‘to allow of a certain freedom of discussion [in the college newspaper] which it might be difficult to maintain in the publication of the trade union.’’35
The divergences between a labor movement seeking ideological conformity and an educational movement committed to free discussion came to a head over the course of 1926 to 1928 and ultimately became the seedbed for the emergence of the ‘‘Musteite’’ movement at the end of the decade. In 1926, several of Brookwood’s students and instructors joined John Brophy’s ‘‘Save-the-Union Movement’’ to wrest control of the UMWA from the autocratic leadership of John L. Lewis. When the insurgent miners organized an anti-Lewis gathering in April 1928, Muste refused to exercise ideological control over students and alumni who attended the conference.36 The incident tied Brookwood to oppositionists and empowered conservatives in their efforts to seize control over workers’ education. As Irving Bernstein has commented, to openly defy John L. Lewis made a break ‘‘inevitable.’’37
Another incident occurred in 1926, this one involving workers’ education, that foreshadowed a split between Brookwood and the AFL. Unfortunately for progressives who had placed so much hope in workers’ education, Matthew Woll, one of the AFL’s most conservative vice presidents, had joined the executive council of the WEB as one of the AFL’s three representatives. In 1926, the adult education movement, which had emerged concomitantly with the workers’ education movement, made overtures to the WEB, offering it a grant of $25,000 from the Carnegie Corporation. Conservatives like Woll favored acceptance of the grant, while progressives viewed it as an effort to co-opt their movement. At a meeting of the WEB in April of 1926, progressives sought to clearly differentiate adult education and workers’ education. As James Maurer stated, the former was ‘‘designed, for the most part, either to give a bit of culture to the student, or else to lift him out of his present job into a higher one.’’ Workers’ education, by contrast, had a class perspective and agenda of educating the worker into the labor movement and of service to the working class. With twenty-one other progressives, Muste voted against accepting the funds, while a majority of forty-six voted in favor of acceptance, so long as the funds were given unconditionally.38
Yet the AFL of the mid-1920s simply would not tolerate dissent; Spencer Miller Jr., secretary of the WEB, was so offended by the sentiment against adult education that he questioned the right of Brookwood to remain affiliated with the WEB.39 Meanwhile, the AFL moved to tighten their control over the bureau. In 1927, at the AFL’s annual convention in Los Angeles, the federation recommended that the WEB limit the membership of the executive committee to national AFL representatives, a move that would have essentially stripped the executive board of any representation from those most directly involved in workers’ education. Muste went on public record in opposition to this ‘‘wrong step in workers’ education,’’ pointing out the need to have labor educators involved in executive decision making, and questioning the ability of teachers to maintain academic freedom when their institutions were solely under the control of personnel with no connection to workers’ education.40
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