WORKERS’ EDUCATION
We come now to one of the most important aspects of American education,
the movement of the workers to take charge of their own minds. We have
surveyed the field, and seen that our great universities and small
colleges, with negligibly few exceptions, represent education of the
people by the plutocracy for the plutocracy. As the class struggle
intensifies, it naturally occurs to the exploited classes to have an
educational system of their own, to be run by them for their own
benefit. This is the movement known as Workers’ Education.
I have been protesting in this book against class control of thinking.
So the average American reader will be moved to say: “You object to
capitalist class education, but now you are going to favor working class
education!” There are a few words to be said on this subject before we
enter the workers’ colleges.
Let us assume for a moment that, human nature being what it is, and the
forces of capitalism being what they are, we have to have some kind of
class control of education. Which would be preferable, capitalist class
education or working class education? The first point in reply is that
the workers outnumber the capitalists in our society by a hundred to
one; education for the benefit of the workers would be, therefore,
education for the benefit of a hundred times as many people. The next
point is that the workers extend to all capitalists a cordial invitation
to become workers; whereas the capitalists extend no such invitation to
the workers. They may, of course, do it in Fourth of July speeches and
political campaign platforms, but in everyday life they do everything
possible to keep the workers from becoming capitalists, and compel them
to remain workers. If the capitalists were to accept the invitation of
the workers and become workers, we should have classes abolished in our
society, and our workers’ education would be education for the benefit
of all.
For this reason the program of the workers is generous and free, whereas
that of the capitalists is selfish and repressive. The worker is able to
face the truth, while the capitalist dares not face it. The worker has
everything to gain by the truth, while the capitalist has everything to
lose. So it happens that if you compare workers’ colleges with
capitalist colleges, you invariably find this difference: the workers’
college believes in free discussion, and will hear anybody argue about
any question; whereas the capitalist college fears free discussion, and
invents a hundred pretexts to keep the other side from being heard. I
have shown you everywhere throughout the country representatives of the
working class being denied an opportunity to present their point of view
to the students in capitalist colleges. I have never heard of a
capitalist being denied an opportunity to explain his point of view to
the students of workers’ colleges; on the contrary, I have known of many
cases of capitalists, or representatives of capitalism, being invited to
debate, and finding some excuse to decline the invitation.
In the above discussion I am using the word “workers” in the
intelligent, revolutionary sense. I do not mean the men who dig ditches
or who run machines; I mean workers of hand or brain, all those men and
women who do the useful and necessary work of the world, whether it be
digging ditches or surveying them, tending machines or inventing them,
sweeping out the buildings of a college, or teaching in its class-rooms,
or determining its policies. I am using the term workers in
contradistinction to the owners, those who live by monopolizing the
means whereby other men live, and exacting from the others a tribute for
the right to work. Also, I should explain that when I speak of labor, I
do not mean the old-style labor unions which hold the field today. I
perfectly well understand that they are products of capitalism, animated
by the greeds and jealousies of the profit system. Little by little,
however, these labor unions are forced to widen their boundaries, to
combine and take in larger groups of the workers; and at the same time
they broaden their ideals, and approach the revolutionary point of view,
which understands by social justice the right of all workers to access
to the sources of wealth, and understands by freedom the right of all
men to agitate, educate and organize for a society in which no man
exploits his fellows.
In college after college we have seen the brains of the working class
stolen away from them; we have seen young men and women who come from
the working class, and who should fight for their class and save it,
being seduced by the dress-suit bribe, the flummeries and snobberies of
academic life, and becoming traitors to their class, betrayers and even
murderers of their class. So come the organized workers to save their
own; to teach their sons and daughters, first, class loyalty, and
through that, loyalty to truth and social justice. Such is the meaning
of Workers’ Education.
We have seen the capitalist college reveal its true colors on many
occasions; but never does it reveal it more plainly than when the
workers proceed to organize their own educational system. I have shown
you Professor Egbert, Director of University Extension and Director of
the School of Business of Columbia University, displaying himself to the
extent of three columns in the New York “Times,” announcing that
“workers’ education has virtually broken down in America.” But the
interlocking professors do not content themselves with lying about labor
education in the capitalist press; they and their masters intrigue
against it, they boycott it, they turn loose their slander factories,
their Helen Ghouls and “hundred percent” mobs against it. We have seen
the typewriters and the teachers of the Rand School of Social Science
being thrown down the stairs. We shall see professors of capitalist
colleges being, figuratively speaking, thrown down the stairs for
venturing to help in labor education.
Let us take, for example, the experience of the Workers’ College of
Minneapolis, narrated in an affidavit by E. H. H. Holman, chairman of
the education committee of some of the labor unions. The Workers’
College of Minneapolis laid down a very moderate program:
It is hereby proposed to organize an educational program for the
workers of Minneapolis, under their own control, through which such
educational work will be undertaken as will better fit them to serve
society through a wider comprehension of social problems, through an
understanding of the technique of industrial production, and through a
better knowledge of the labor problem in general, thus to be in
position to act effectively in the solution of pressing problems that
grip the world today.
Not such a bad statement, you may concede. This statement was adopted in
December, 1920, and classes were organized, among them a class in public
speaking. Professor T. P. Beyer of Hamline University was asked to take
charge of this class, and he did so. There were protests in the
newspapers of the Twin Cities, and several of the interlocking regents
of Hamline gave newspaper interviews registering their indignation. It
had been stated in the contract with Professor Beyer that he was not
expected “to advocate any theories or further any propaganda.”
Nevertheless, the grand dukes of Hamline spoke, and Professor Beyer
withdrew. Shortly afterwards Mr. Holman happened to meet President
Kerfoot of Hamline University, a Methodist clergyman holding three
honorary degrees; and this gentleman said that “it would never do” to
have one of his professors linked up with radicals. “Those who
contribute the money to support Hamline would never stand for it.”
Again in Topeka, Kansas, the labor men were conducting an open forum,
and considering the project for a labor college. Some of the professors
from Washburn College took to attending this forum, and meeting these
labor leaders. The interlocking newspapers made a scandal out of it, the
intrigue being conducted by the secretary of the Merchants and
Manufacturers’ Association, who was maintaining a black-list against
union men. One of the professors at Washburn College received a
threatening letter; it was supposed to have come from the labor group,
but manifestly it came from this “M & M” agent, or some of his spies.
Anyway, the Washburn College professors were compelled to cease
attending the open forum.
In Denver the president of the newly organized labor college applied for
the use of some of the high school buildings, in the evening. The
request was turned down, on the ground that the college was too radical;
if the authorities allowed working-class people to meet in the schools,
they must also allow the capitalists to meet. In Denver, you see, they
have never opened the schools for free discussion, or for teaching the
people anything except what the politicians approve. In this case the
school authorities said that they would allow the use of the rooms,
provided they were allowed to appoint the instructors!
Johns Hopkins University moved out to its magnificent new site at
Homewood, which it had obtained by the selling of its soul. The old
buildings were left in Baltimore, and the Reverend Richard Hogue,
secretary of the Church League for Industrial Democracy, applied for the
use of one of the buildings. They had actually begun meeting, under the
direction of one of the professors, but the university put them out by
order of the trustees. The “hundred percenters” who superintend
education in Baltimore call themselves the George Washington Society,
and they bitterly attacked one Johns Hopkins professor for taking part
in a labor college, and demanded that he be forced out of Johns Hopkins.
You may be interested to know how it comes about that a young professor
in one of our most prosperous and important universities happened to be
espousing the cause of self-education by the workers. This young
professor at the outbreak of the war was a reporter for the Richmond
“News-Leader,” and a strike was threatened in the Richmond plant of the
American Locomotive Company. The basis of the strike was the refusal of
the company officials to comply with the regulations of the War Labor
Board; and the young reporter wrote the facts, and his newspaper
published them, to the great indignation of the interlocking
directorate. In the midst of the controversy a stranger turned up—we
will call him Brown—producing credentials from the New York “World.” He
pretended to be sympathetic to the union men, and diligently sought
information concerning them. The “News-Leader” became suspicious, and
telegraphed to the New York “World,” and the answer came, “Brown is all
right.”
So Brown continued his operations for a few days longer. He suggested to
the young reporter a wonderful plan to get the facts about what the
company was doing; he and the reporter were to bribe the book-keeper,
and break into the company offices at night! Such temptations arise now
and then in the lives of newspapermen, and if it is information against
labor unions you are seeking, you may employ such methods. But this
reporter knew that you cannot commit burglaries against big business,
and his paper investigated further, and discovered that Brown was a
secret agent of the American Locomotive Company, operating under the
protection of the New York “World”! The young professor suggested that
this story would fit in “The Brass Check”; but it seems to me that it
does very well in this place—showing how a college professor who leaves
the shelter of the cloister is forced to revise his formulas concerning
large scale capitalist industry!