American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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of that year.41 A few months later, Muste published an article in Labor Age responding to rumors that the AFL officialdom viewed labor education as ‘‘unpatriotic and un-American, atheistic and radical (Bolshevik).’’ In it, he questioned the worth of a labor movement that was unwilling to allow its rank and file to ‘‘examine their own opinions’’ in order ‘‘to develop critical, fearless, open, independent minds!’’ ‘‘Have we now a labor dogma, a labor creed, a labor orthodoxy, to which all must conform? Which must be taught . . . as a given system of doctrine is imparted in a sectarian theological seminary?’’ Such thinking was based on the assumption ‘‘that there is danger in a critical discussion of labor policies,’’ but, in fact, the real danger was in preventing free discussion in the first place.42
As the debate over workers’ education played out, several disgruntled Brookwood students sought to exploit the controversy over the UMWA in order to undermine the school. Passionate debate had been a central feature of Brookwood student life from the school’s inception, but these disagreements were generally expressed and resolved within the culture of ecumenism and academic freedom that Brookwood sought to foster. In 1927–28, however, the school had admitted several students from conservative backgrounds who deeply resented the radicalism of some of their peers, a resentment that was heavily tinged with anti-Semitism and misogyny. One of them was a miner who opposed Brophy’s ‘‘Save-the-Union Movement.’’ In 1928, he published an account of the fractious UMWA conference that exposed the Brookwood students who attended the conference and accused them of being Communists. The other conservative students rose to his defense and persuaded their internationals, the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, the International Association of Machinists, and the International Brotherhood of Painters and Allied Trades to withdraw their funding for Brookwood.43
For the first time in Brookwood’s history, Muste was unable to reconcile the student body; the second-year class voted to bar the offending student from their final seminar on the grounds that he could not be trusted, while the handful of conservative students left the school and refused to attend graduation ceremonies. It was ‘‘painful and distressing’’ to graduate students ‘‘out of accord with [what] Brookwood is trying to do,’’ Muste stated at the graduation ceremony, yet he stood firm ‘‘on the fundamental things that Brookwood stands for and is trying to do’’ and accepted ‘‘the challenge of those who do not believe in those things.’’ Those ‘‘things’’ were a militant labor movement committed to energetically and courageously organizing the unorganized, raising the political and economic consciousness of American workers, freedom in workers’ education, and anti-imperialism. If the American labor movement considered this treasonous, ‘‘then let them make the most of it.’’ To be seen as ‘‘unpatriotic, irreligious, and red’’ was to be ‘‘in good company’’; Jesus and the Founding Fathers had been viewed similarly by their contemporaries. It would be ‘‘a pleasant death to die’’ in the service of militant unionism, he opined in what can only be viewed as a sermon.44
In spite of his firm tone, one senses Muste’s foreboding as he clarified his position. ‘‘One might hope that if we are to fight each other, it might be with a little more mercy and decency and fair play than ordinarily characterizes conflicts in the labor movement.’’45 Yet the fight was not to be merciful. On August 7, 1928, the executive council of the AFL, unexpectedly and without warning, announced that it was advising all of its affiliated unions to withdraw their support from Brookwood Labor College. Though this did not emerge until later, its decision was based upon a secret report by Matthew Woll, which had been instigated by the complaints of the same conservative students who had red-baited Brookwood a few months earlier. The report was not released to the public nor was the source of the evidence against the college revealed, but it persuaded Green and the executive council that it was a ‘‘propagandistic and communistic’’ institution that promulgated dual unionism, sexual immorality, and antireligious views. The charge of dual unionism was particularly ironic: when Muste learned of the announcement, he was in the middle of leading negotiation efforts to bring Paterson’s Associated Silk Workers into the UTW.46
Muste returned immediately to Brookwood and rallied its supporters. The next day, the college’s board of directors issued a statement calling the charges ‘‘without foundation’’ and voicing particular concern over the process through which the college had been censured, which violated the ‘‘fundamental labor principles of fair play, collective bargaining, and conference about grievances.’’ The board requested a copy of the charges against the college, the evidence upon which they were based, and a hearing to respond to them.47
The case quickly became a cause célèbre among progressive unionists, liberals, and educators. Letters of support poured in to Muste, while telegrams of protest flooded the AFL executive office. John Brophy wrote to Muste that ‘‘what has been meted out to Brookwood . . . is exactly what the Executive Committee of the UMWA meted out to me. All opposition, no matter of what character, they labeled communistic and expulsions followed.’’ Fannia Cohn protested to Green that Brookwood deserved a hearing because of its affiliation with the WEB, the ‘‘the educational arm’’ of the AFL, because its faculty were members of the AFT, and because its board of directors were all loyal members of the AFL with long records of service and strong anti-Communist credentials. She called it ‘‘unintelligible’’ that only four disgruntled students had been consulted, while the 125 other Brookwood students and graduates who had ‘‘a favorable opinion . . . are not questioned or given an opportunity to discuss frankly the charges made.’’48 Alumni like Charles Reed, Mary Goff, and William Ross similarly wrote to defend Brookwood’s educational methods, explaining how the college taught them ‘‘how to read, how to write, and how to talk . . . to examine each situation and all situations in the light of Facts; and to face those facts regardless of the consequences.’’49
Finally, on October 30, the AFL executive council met to consider the question of whether or not Brookwood should be granted a hearing. Woll won the day with the dubious argument that Brookwood should not enjoy a hearing because Communists had ‘‘freely’’ condemned the AFL without giving its internationals a chance for a hearing. The way the AFL handled the entire case was disingenuous; Green even reported to the New York Times that Brookwood had not asked to present its side of the case to the executive council.50
The controversy reveals the precarious position of progressives within the labor movement in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the tensions inherent to the workers’ education project. Left-leaning unionists like Muste had retreated from their revolutionary stance of the war years and pursued rapprochement with the conservative wing of the labor movement. They rarely criticized the federation’s policies openly and instead sought to gradually impress upon the labor movement the need to modernize its methods and framework to meet the challenges of a new era of industrial capitalism. Within the workers’ education movement, they allowed for the expression of a range of opinions and emphasized the importance of taking a more experimental and scientific approach to labor’s problems, while also holding that the working class must be unified and American society collectivized. Their philosophical approach was a complex one; it drew, on the one hand, from liberal theories of individual freedom and, on the other, from notions of solidarity and collective purpose that animated the labor movement and other cooperative projects. Muste’s notion of the labor movement as a combination of army and town meeting was to the point; the poles of authoritarianism and democracy were inevitable by-products of unionism, but they could also be the source of creativity and growth if handled in a spirit of flexibility and adaptability, recognizing that the labor movement was a ‘‘living movement.’’ Hence he and other progressive unionists believed that they should have ‘‘the right of criticism’’ while also being considered loyal members of the AFL.51
It is revealing that progressives viewed the question of workers’ education as one of academic freedom, while the AFL insisted that it had to do ‘‘with the fundamentals of trade unionism,’’ as Matthew Woll put it.52 Underlying this misunderstanding were two very different visions of the role of the labor movement in American society. AFL conservatives had disavowed the ‘‘oft-expounded theory