THE WORKERS’ COLLEGES
I begin this chapter by telling you about a very pleasant enterprise,
the resident college which has just been started by the labor education
movement, the Brookwood School at Katonah, New York. Brookwood is a
co-educational college, with a two years’ course and a year of
post-graduate work. Its aims are set forth as follows:
Brookwood aims to train economists, statisticians, journalists,
writers and teachers, organizers, workers and speakers, for the labor
and farmer movements in order that these movements may have people
coming from their own ranks, with their own point of view, who are
fully capable by training and knowledge of exercising a genuine
statesmanship.
Brookwood was organized by Toscan Bennett, a reformed corporation
lawyer, and his wife, a reformed suffragette. They purchased a farm,
with a beautiful old colonial building, and this summer, while I am
writing a book, they are working on new dormitories—and I wish I might
be there! If you want to find in this ugly and greedy world a place
where the true spirit of comradeship prevails, where men and women,
middle-aged and young, consecrate themselves with fervor, and also with
fun, to the service of freedom and social justice, take my advice and
pay a visit to Brookwood.
The clothing workers’ unions in New York and the coal miners in
Pennsylvania furnish most of the pupils, and pay a part of their
expenses. They are taught by the customary outfit of kicked-out college
professors and school teachers. There is Josephine Colby, who organized
the teachers of Fresno, California, and was separated from her position
by a superintendent who stated in the newspapers that he didn’t believe
in using arguments in dealing with union school teachers, the thing to
use was a baseball bat. Also there is David Saposs, who was in a student
revolt at the University of Wisconsin, when the working students
organized and got the business manager of the university fired; as a
result, Saposs was told that it would do him no good to get a degree, as
he would not be recommended for a teaching position!
Also there is A. J. Muste, a reformed Quaker clergyman, who has received
a quite unique training for his career as labor educator. I first heard
of him as a theological student, through a little mimeographed circular,
“Towards a New Preaching Order.” He and a group of three or four young
men proposed to go out into the world in the old apostolic fashion,
without scrip or purse, and bring capitalism to its knees by moral
fervor. It was a most eloquent piece of writing, and I marked this young
clergyman for a career. Next I heard of him in the Lawrence textile
strike of 1919; his “preaching order” was trying its eloquence upon the
president of the Woolen Trust, who came within an ace of going to
prison, upon the charge of having had dynamite planted in the homes of
non-union workers, as a means of discrediting the strikers. Mr. Wood did
not yield to young Muste’s apostolic fervor; on the contrary, he had his
Cossacks ride the young clergyman down on the sidewalk, and pound him
over the head with their clubs and finally throw him into jail. So Mr.
Muste preached to the strikers, and following the best apostolic
precedents, started a soup kitchen for them, performing the miracle of
the loaves and fishes with the help of checks from a few good angels
scattered over the country. After he had got through with that strike,
he was a trained labor scholar and ready to teach literature in a
workers’ college!
Four years ago there were only two or three labor colleges in the United
States, all of them in New York City; now there are six in the state of
Pennsylvania alone. A bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor,
published in June, 1921, “Education of Adult Working Classes,” lists
twenty-four such institutions, in places as widely scattered as
Washington, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Paul,
Minneapolis, Duluth and Seattle. The auspices under which these schools
are organized are: central labor unions, five; local unions, five;
international unions, five; State federations, seven; Socialist and
radical groups, one; the Women’s Trade-Union League, one.
Mr. Paul Blanshard, secretary of the Rochester Labor College, gives me
an interesting account of one such institution, and the vicissitudes
of a would-be teacher. Mr. Blanshard got his training in
class-consciousness during the textile strike at Utica several years
ago; he tried to start some classes for foreigners in English, and the
interlocking newspapers took him up, and all Utica read that he was
starting “a school in Bolshevism”! The Lusk committee went after
him—on the testimony of a police captain who was later released from
the force under grave suspicion; also of a detective in the employ of
the Helen Ghouls. Mr. Blanshard, of course, was not given a hearing,
and the scare headlines in the newspapers frightened away all his
pupils.
But the Amalgamated Clothing Workers are powerful in Rochester, and are
not so easily frightened; they joined with thirteen other unions to make
a college for Mr. Blanshard to run. They make a contribution of one cent
per month for each member, a total income of seven hundred dollars a
year—which no doubt looks extremely small to Professor Egbert of
Columbia University, which has seven millions a year. Nevertheless, on
this income the college has weekly educational mass meetings, addressed
by the livest men in the country, and attended by some fifteen hundred
workers; it publishes a four-page educational bulletin every week, and
has classes in unionism and public speaking, in English, in current
events, in economics, and in labor problems.
That is a glimpse at one city; and you will find the same thing
happening in all the others. In Portland, Oregon, the college meets in
the Labor Temple, and the Central Labor Council assesses one-twelfth of
its total revenue to save its brains for its own uses. In New York City
two of the greatest unions, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers
and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, have established educational
departments, and are carrying out elaborate programs for the benefit of
their members. The I. L. G. W. U. has eight “unity centers” in New York
public schools, with classes in English, the teachers assigned by the
Board of Education. It arranges independent courses in the labor
movement, economics, psychology, literature, music, health, etc. Its
“Workers’ University” meets in the Washington Irving High School, with
courses in about twenty subjects, and a registration of three hundred
students. Also there is an extension department, which arranges for
lectures, concerts, and classes of all sorts at the headquarters of the
various local unions. There are branches of this enterprise in Cleveland
and Philadelphia, and the whole thing is the growth of only four years.
In order to realize the deliberate dishonesty of Professor Egbert’s
statement that “labor education has virtually broken down in America,”
you should have attended a conference called by the Workers’ Education
Bureau of America, organized in connection with the New School for
Social Research in New York City, for the purpose of co-ordinating these
labor colleges, and furnishing them with literature and text-books. This
conference was held April 22 and 23, 1922, just one month before
Professor Egbert’s three columns of treachery were featured in the New
York “Times.” Here were eager delegates, teachers and students,
addressed by speakers as wide apart in their views as Samuel Gompers,
James Maurer, Charles A. Beard and Benjamin Schlesinger. I will list the
subjects discussed at one of the sessions, dealing with “Teaching
Methods in Workers’ Education”—this just to give you an idea of the
breadth of view and practical grip of the movement: “The Forum,” “The
Debate,” “School-room Methods,” “Discussion Methods,” “Health
Education,” “Methods of Health Education,” “The Teaching of Economics,”
“Journalism,” “Mass Education,” “Educational Aspects of Work,”
“Correspondence Education,” “Text Books,” “Public Discussion,” “Trade
Union Meetings,” “Problems of Adult Instruction.”
Also this Workers’ Education Bureau is publishing a series of volumes,
entitled “The Workers’ Bookshelf,” to serve as text-books in the labor
colleges. They are the kind of books I believe in, for they cost only
fifty cents a volume. In the “Labor Age,” New York, you will find much
news about these movements. Also you should know something about the
work in England, where it is twenty years old, and has grown to be the
brains and fighting spirit of the British labor movement. The story is
told in “An Adventure in Working Class Education,” by Albert Mansbridge,
founder and general secretary of the Workers’ Educational Association of
Great Britain. The radicals who are making over the mind of British
labor have a magazine, the “Plebs,” which American students ought to
see.
Teaching at these workers’ colleges is a very different matter from
being an old-line college professor. Here you have students who really
want to study. You are back in the twelfth century when five thousand
men thronged to Paris and sat on the hillside to listen to Abelard and
dispute with him. You are back in the old days in America, when a
college was “a student sitting one end of a log and Mark Hopkins on the
other end.” You are dealing with students who, while they may be
painfully deficient in book learning, have acquired much knowledge of
life, and are accustomed to assert their point of view. It does not
occur to them to defer to authority; they only defer to facts, and you
have to produce the facts and convince them. Many times the teacher will
find that he himself has become a student, and all college professors
who have tried the adventure agreed in testifying how exhilarating they
find this.
Labor education offers to the college professor a semi-respectable way
to get into contact with the real world. So I plead with professors who
read this book to avail themselves of the opportunities existing—or if
there are none in their neighborhood, to get busy and make some. I am
told of one professor in Pennsylvania who used to travel about from town
to town teaching labor groups, a class each night in a different town.
That is real adventure, and it lies right at the gates of all our
institutions of higher learning. Try it for a year or two, and you may
find that you have built up a clientele, and no longer have to shiver in
your boots when you hear a rumor that one of your trustees has asked
whether it is true that you are a Bolshevik!