American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson
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between the Associated Silk Workers and the UTW. The process, for which Muste had served as arbiter, was a difficult one in which progressives had to coax and plead with conservatives in the UTW. Finally, when an agreement was hammered out and placed before the membership for a vote, Muste wrote incredulously, ‘‘those who had started this movement, nursed it along, toiled for it, turned square around and let it be known that . . . they would not support it’’ because the Communist Party had decided to change its tactics from ‘‘boring from within’’ to dual unionism. While he was willing to concede that consistency was ‘‘the vice of little minds,’’ it was also ‘‘childish’’ to make ‘‘frivolous changes of front,’’ particularly when there was such a desperate urge to organize industrial workers. Repeating a frequent theme, he bemoaned that in the United States, the official labor movement was so conservative, while the left wing, which had ‘‘courage, amazing vitality,’’ exhibited such ‘‘childishness, lack of realism, cheap bickering, mere fury that creates endless turmoil.’’ In between these two extremes were ‘‘many afflicted with the malady of defeatism’’ yet who still dreamed of ‘‘a world freed from exploitation and in the control of the workers.’’ Who would be ‘‘willing to act’’ to reignite this dormant idealism, Muste wondered?67
Muste was thus in a bind when the AFL attacked Brookwood as a ‘‘communistic’’ institution. On the one hand, he had consistently opposed sectarianism and had tried to maintain comradely relations with Communists. On the other hand, he viewed Communist tactics as destructive of trade unionism and unrealistic in the context of the late 1920s. Moreover, reflecting his laborist agenda, he was far more interested in having good relations with the labor movement than with a small radical sect.68
Over the course of December 1928 and January 1929, Brookwood clarified its policy of nonexclusion, while at the same time stating its refusal to become a Communist-controlled institution. Ironically, the college would find itself unable to maintain this policy. Even though the Communist Party prohibited members from attending Brookwood, a handful of them were accepted as students over the course of the next several years. Muste and other Brookwood faculty soon discovered that these students were not attending the college in good faith, but were rather bent upon ‘‘disrupting and destroying the school.’’ As they explained, these students ‘‘openly expressed hostility’’ toward Brookwood, left in the middle of the term under party orders, flaunted school discipline, and worked with the party to deprive Brookwood of financial contributions. Moreover, Communists who had graduated from the college ‘‘openly repudiated Brookwood and attempted to work against it.’’ Asserting that ‘‘no school is under any obligation’’ to accept students committed to its destruction, Brookwood banned Communists from attendance so long as the party’s policy was one of attacking elements it considered reformist, though it continued to invite Communist speakers to lecture at the college.69
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