Enlightenment and Radicalism

A pamphlet circulated in early worker organizing efforts on “Education and the Workingman” from the 1830s noted that “a large body of human beings are ruined by neglect of education, rendered miserable in the extreme, and incapable of self-government.” Thomas Paine included the right to an education among the essential rights of man. During the 1820s, a mechanics association in Philadelphia established an institution “for the improvement of the mind and intellectual condition of mechanics.” Invariably, free public schools became a prominent demand of the workingmen’s political parties that flourished, briefly, during the Jacksonian era.

Fusing the desire for education with resistance to the new capitalist order marked working-class as well as agrarian populist movements all through the nineteenth century. Curricula embraced an entrée into classical and modern ideas in the social and natural sciences as well as the arts, along with close study and discussion of radical thinkers: Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, among others.

Chicago was host to several Arbeiter-Vereine, or “workers clubs,” made up of immigrant German workers, whose members subscribed to the Communist Manifesto. The clubs maintained substantial libraries and reading rooms and held regular debates and lectures on a wide range of subjects, as well as social functions like picnics and concerts. As an ensemble, they were a key component of a wider artisan culture. It was cosmopolitan and literate — accustomed, for example, to hiring one of their number to read to the rest while they worked. Enlightenment and radical politics were two sides of the same coin.

The same was true for populist insurgents in the countryside. The Farmers Alliance sought to become the “most powerful and complete educator of modern times.” It maintained a network of traveling lecturers, lending libraries, and book clubs. Local lodges held courses on history, literature, political economy, financial and monetary systems, and the natural sciences. In the eyes of rebellious farmers, education was a key to purging public life of corruption and corporate domination.

Education for Revolution

Socialism had become a tangible presence in American life by early in the twentieth century. Its growth clarified and diversified the mission of radical education. As Eugene V. Debs put it in 1912, “The workers can be emancipated only by their own collective will . . . and this collective will and conquering power can only be the result of education, enlightenment and self-imposed discipline.” Generations later, Che Guevara would note that “the first duty of a revolutionary is to be educated.”

Deepening the knowledge of the already active and committed was not enough, however. Radical schools needed to contest the ruling ideas that pervaded society. Schooling for radicalism entailed what would later be characterized by Antonio Gramsci and others as the struggle for intellectual and cultural hegemony; earlier, Marx wrote about communists seeking “to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” This became the aim of the great left-wing schools of the modern era.

When the Socialist Party opened the Rand School of the Social Sciences in 1906, few could have imagined the scale of its success over the next fifteen years. It was named after and funded by an heiress, Carrie Rand, herself an active socialist and married to George Herron, a prominent member of the party in New York. This was the period of greatest popularity for the Socialist Party in the city and around the country. The school grew accordingly.

Beginning its first year with a handful of courses and 250 students, it was soon enrolling thousands, mostly from the working class, a large percentage of them union members. Initially most students belonged to the party, but soon the school enrolled nonmembers in growing numbers, many of whom later joined the party.

Most classes were at night or on the weekend. They covered the waterfront: introductions to the history and economics of socialism, lectures on ethics and philosophy, specialized courses on the history of the labor movement, socialism, and art, the “evolution of race antagonism,” as well as an introduction to trade unionism, classes on child labor and women workers, immigration, housing, and “proletarian diseases.” Some courses were held in cooperation with local unions, especially the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, focusing on labor law and the nitty-gritty of trade unionism. Although the great majority of students attended part-time, usually taking single courses, Rand introduced a six-month-long full-time training curriculum for those seen as socialist leaders of the future.

Rand charged a modest tuition and hardly paid its full-time faculty at all. The faculty included a remarkable roster of leading left-wing and liberal intellectuals: the controversial historians Charles Beard and Mary Beard; radical economist and pacifist Scott Nearing, fired from the Wharton School for his views; distinguished Columbia University sociologist Franklin Giddings; social theorist Stuart Chase, whose activities spanned the Henry George single tax movement, women’s suffrage, and socialism; and socialist leader Norman Thomas. The absence of women and people of color is obvious, but not total. In addition to Mary Beard, socialist activist Helen Keller taught at Rand, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Maley (the first woman to run for governor of Washington), and A. Philip Randolph.

Branches of the Rand School sprang up in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and New Jersey. It ran a correspondence school of five thousand people that eventually supported a substantial library, reading rooms, a gymnasium, and an auditorium. It even opened a restaurant, the Red Flag, in the basement and became a center of the city’s exuberant radical cultural life. By 1917, its home off Manhattan’s Union Square was known as the “People’s House.”

Rand was done in by the wartime and postwar Red Scare. The Lusk Committee of the New York State Legislature, which led the way in expelling Socialist Party representatives from the assembly, raided the school on multiple occasions. Vigilante groups did as well. Although the Rand School continued for some years after the war, it never fully recovered.

Socialism and Trade Unionism

Early in the twentieth century, the idea of a specifically socialist educational enterprise could hardly be divorced from the union-building project. In the years before and just after World War I, socialists, Wobblies, communists, and advocates of a muscular Social Gospel all saw a radical analysis of capitalism and a Marxist understanding of class conflict as intrinsic to the contemporary effort to organize trade unions in textiles and apparel, steel, and coal mining, on the railroads, docks, and seafaring lanes, and in the new factories that churned out cars, radios, and processed food.

Not all trade unionists accepted this idea, certainly not top leaders of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). But for those labor partisans seeking to vastly expand and radicalize the labor movement, the proliferation in the early twentieth century of a wonderfully diverse array of magazines, lectures, reading circles, and worker schools gave much substance to radical hopes and aspirations.

This project may well have reached its apogee in the years just after World War I. According to Tobias Higbie, author of Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life, left-wing unions and their radical middle-class supporters established some twenty “colleges” and “institutes” for workers between 1918 and 1921. Most of these were local efforts like the Cleveland Workers University, the Seattle Workers College, and the St. Paul Labor College.

In 1921, the YWCA and the Women’s Trade Union League helped organize the Summer School for Women in Industry at Bryn Mawr College, which in turn became the model for a similar program at the University of Wisconsin a few years later. In the South, radical intellectuals launched Commonwealth College in rural Arkansas in 1923 and the. Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932.

By far the most important and well-emulated labor/socialist educational project was the Brookwood Labor College, located on an expansive estate at Katonah, New York, a couple hours north of the big city. Initially, Brookwood was financially supported by several AFL trade unions and by the Garland Fund, a million-dollar philanthropic enterprise controlled in the 1920s by a board composed of moderate unionists, civil libertarians, and socialists. Led by the socialist, pacifist minister A. J. Muste, Brookwood offered lectures and classes taught by some of the most important reformers and radicals of the 1920s and 1930s: historian Charles Beard, economists David J. Saposs and Broadus Mitchell, Socialist Party activists Tucker Smith and Roy Reuther, and union organizers Louis Budenz, Tom Tippett, and Clinton Golden.

Initially, Brookwood sought to enroll thirty or forty young proletarians each year, recruited right out of the mills, mines, and factories where organizing drives and strikes had often put such workers in touch with more seasoned organizers. Vetted and recommended by union officials, these students were slated to spend upward of two years on the campus, taking courses that ranged from labor history and economics to sociology, English literature, creative writing, and public speaking.

Because so many students were immigrants or had very low levels of education, basic courses in reading and writing were also taught. Brookwood was therefore supremely ambitions: it would enroll untutored working-class men and women and transform them into cosmopolitan and resourceful leaders of their class and community.

Many Brookwood graduates would play important roles in the union movement, but they were of a different sort than Muste and his comrades had initially envisioned. Brookwood shifted toward a far more explicitly socialist orientation because of two developments. First, the AFL, fearing Brookwood as a socialist or communist hotbed of opposition to existing union leadership, denounced the school in the late 1920s and withdrew financial and organizational support. Just a few years later, the Depression crippled the Garland Fund, putting Brookwood’s finances in an even more precarious state.

The school could no longer hope to house and educate students who came from the very bottom of the working class, nor could it sustain a two-year curriculum designed to enculturate such a student body. By the early 1930s, Brookwood was bringing to its campus the kind of college students, movement activists, and skilled workers who would actually become the organizers and leaders of the new industrial unions. It was a cadre school for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, connecting and cultivating the men and women who had already achieved a certain level of leadership, experience, and education.

By the mid 1930s, the school hosted, as either students or instructors, all three of the Reuther brothers, civil rights activists Ella Baker and Pauli Murray, fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, and union researchers and educators Nat Weinberg, Larry Rogin, and Joel Seidman. By the time Brookwood folded in 1937, most of its graduates had enlisted their talents in the service of one of the new industrial unions.

Homeroom of the Popular Front

American cultural and intellectual life felt the impact of radical thinking and organizing in a great many ways during the era of the New Deal. The Communist Party was a principal facilitator of that influence, especially during the Popular Front and emphatically so during World War II, when the Party created the Jefferson School of Social Science. The school’s overriding purpose was to fight fascism. It was intensely pro-labor. National unity and democracy were its watchwords; revolution was mentioned, if at all, sotto voce.

The ”Jeff,” as it soon became known, opened in 1944. Very quickly it eclipsed what the Rand School had earlier accomplished. The Jeff enrolled between eight and ten thousand students a year in its heyday. Its student body and faculty embraced artists, writers, workers, trade unionists, musicians, and scholars. A majority of the students may have been women. Fees were modest, and scholarships were available. Although the school did train core party cadre (a special unit, the Institute of Marxist Studies, was a created to do that), it was not a cadre school but open to all.

Courses ran the gamut from the most practical (training in trade union skills) to the theoretical. There were basic introductions to Marxism (held in multiple sections every evening and Saturday mornings), and courses on philosophy along with dance, acting, opera, and music classes. Students studied imperialism and colonialism as well as the rise of the democratic state. There were courses on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, on the woman question, the “Negro” question, and on the United Nations. There were even classes on cartooning and psychiatry and the Marxist approach to sexual morality. Courses were offered examining anti-Marxist views from religion and the social sciences. Special lectures and forums covered current events and contemporary literature. Class was sometimes conducted in Spanish. A division of Jewish studies conducted instruction in Yiddish language and literature.

Faculty included luminaries. Dashiell Hammett taught mystery writing; Pete Seeger, the guitar. Teachers offered left-wing interpretations of William Shakespeare. W. E. B. Du Bois taught about the history of the slave trade and about Africa and world imperialism (Lorraine Hansberry took the class). Howard Fast gave a course on fiction writing; Anton Refregier and Philip Evergood on painting. Some of the school’s teachers had been fired from City College during the Rapp-Coudert hearings (an anti-communist witch hunt in 1941 set up by the New York state legislature). While many teachers hailed from the party, there were also people like US diplomat William Dodd, feminists like Eleanor Flexner, esteemed composers including Marc Blitzstein and Elie Siegmeister, the painters Raphael and Moses Sawyer, and choreographer Anna Sokolow.

Hundreds of courses were offered each term in the Jefferson’s nine-story building near Union Square. Eventually, the Jefferson even opened a children’s school which included “story hours” for kids and “youth nights” for teenagers. Like Rand, the Jefferson maintained a library, a bookstore, and a café.

Like-minded schools soon appeared elsewhere, many bearing the names of other Popular Front heroes: the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago (where more than four thousand black, white, and Hispanic students enrolled), the Tom Paine School in Philadelphia, and the Samuel Adams School in Boston. Annexes appeared in New York’s boroughs. Two black-affiliated schools opened in Harlem. And independent party schools operated in California and elsewhere.

Estimates suggest about 120,000 students enrolled at the Jefferson School between 1944 and 1957. Like the Rand School, however, the “Jeff” was done in by anti-communism. It was compelled to register as a subversive organization under the McCarran Act. Enrollment collapsed.

Under the circumstances, it is remarkable, and a testimony to the lingering strength of Popular Front culture, that the Jefferson School lasted as long as it did. In the struggle for hegemony, the school must be counted a success insofar as it played a substantial role in what historian Michael Denning has described as the “laboring of American culture.”

Radical Education in the Wake of Socialism

If working-class radicalism subsided drastically during the postwar decades, social movements — the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and feminist insurgencies — flourished, at least during the 1960s and early ’70s. Oddly, though, durable institutions of radical education did not.

Freedom Schools were an important component of the civil rights movement in the South. But in the main, Freedom Schools provided the sort of basic instruction denied to generations of young African Americans. That might be considered radical in its own right, and there was certainly plenty of schooling in the rights of citizenship and racial pride. But the anti-capitalism of yesteryear was not an express part of the curriculum.

The New Left did create numerous forums, pamphlets, newspapers, and other forms of education. And Allen and Sharon Krebs did establish the Free School of New York in 1965, staging courses on black liberation, revolutionary art, Cuba, China, and imperialism, among other subjects. Its faculty included radical intellectuals Herbert Aptheker, Lee Baxandall, Paul Krassner, and Staughton Lynd and conveyed a countercultural as well as more conventional political approach to radical education. But it lasted only briefly. Rigorous education and reeducation was a prominent feature of the radical feminist movement, but no enduring institutional form took root.

Academia, however, did feel the impact of the era’s radicalism. Between 1968 and 1972, radical caucuses were formed in virtually every academic discipline. The most important of these was the Union of Radical Political Economists (URPE). Then as now, mainstream economics was practically an arm of the government, Wall Street, and the corporation. So URPE was an embattled movement from the moment a handful of radical grad students founded the organization in the summer of 1968. It sought to counter and subvert reigning orthodoxies and link its own scholarship to the social movements that had emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. As URPE put it, this was a time “when graduate and undergraduate students were clamoring for alternative, left, and Marxian teachings in an atmosphere of broader social change in the United States.”

While URPE did fight for voice and presence at the annual meetings of the American Economic Association, it also put out a series of popular pamphlets and books and conducted Brookwood-like summer encampments where URPE speakers translated a varied set of radical economic approaches to contemporary social issues in language understandable to a lay audience. Marxists and other radicals were mainstays of the organization, but because it was not closely linked to any one social movement, URPE’s élan had faded by the twenty-first century.

Labor Notes, on the other hand, was a very different sort of educational enterprise, enjoying remarkable influence and popularity in the last two decades. In the years before 1979, many of those who would later found Labor Notes were members of the Trotskyist group International Socialists, later merged into Solidarity. They published a newspaper called Workers’ Power, designed to move its working-class readers from “union consciousness” — an understanding of the need for workers to organize to advance their interests, which presumably they already possessed — to class consciousness and then a revolutionary understanding of the world.

But it soon became apparent that union consciousness could hardly be taken for granted. A publication cum educational enterprise was needed that, while critical of contemporary union leadership, saw its main task as educating, connecting, and animating a layer of labor activists whose could build effective rank-and-file unions capable of fighting the boss on a sustained basis.

If socialists were to have any influence, “we had to create a lake to swim in,” recalled the late Mike Parker, an early Labor Notes writer. Kim Moody, a founding staffer, identified its constituency as “the militant minority,” a phrase also used by labor historian David Montgomery when describing the activist layer that made possible Brookwood and the other labor schools in the years following the great strike wave at the end of World War I.

This is why Labor Notes emphasized the mobilization of workers — not to seek the ouster of existing union officials (although when reform movements emerged or grew in the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, and other unions, Labor Notes supported them) but rather to participate in organizing drives, contract campaigns, work stoppages, and strikes, sanctioned or otherwise. Labor Notes writers, organizers, and lecturers were all socialists of one sort or another, but from the Ronald Reagan era onward, they eschewed the public advertisement of that label, even if the analysis they offered and the programs they advanced was that derived from a Marxist understanding of work, welfare, and the capitalist world.

Such a strategy proved essential in an era when conservative forces were ascendant and when, to put it charitably, the leadership of most big unions proved inadequate to the challenges that were steadily shrinking both the power and membership of the organizations over which they presided. One of the keys to Labor Notes’ longevity is that it filled the vacuum, ideological, organizational, and of spirit, created by a trade union apparatus in defeat and retreat.

To take a seemingly prosaic example: grievance handling stands at the heart of shop-floor unionism, but for too many workers it had become a highly bureaucratized and legalistic procedure drained of any sense of self-empowerment. Labor Notes has therefore long published a column entitled “The Steward’s Corner,” which offers exceedingly practical advice to help turn grievance-handling disputes into union-building moments.

If Labor Notes had been merely a periodical, it would have seemed a somewhat slight competitor to such venerable left-wing publications as Monthly Review and Dissent. But Labor Notes has touched the lives of many thousands, because its monthly newsletter and its other publications are organically linked to the lively schools and workshops it has conducted over the years and the internationally well-known conferences — now bringing together over four thousand people — that it holds every other year, initially in Detroit but now in Chicago.

From a pedological and organizational perspective, the regional “Troublemaker” schools are probably most successful. Attracting upwards of two hundred unionists, these periodic workshops enable a set of militants from a single union, industry, or locale to take in lectures and readings from Labor Notes veterans. In years past, a set of “team concept schools” helped mobilize opposition to management’s latest speed-up initiative. Today Troublemaker schools, some online, cover such practical but vital union building topics as “Dealing with Difficult Supervisors,” “Assertive Grievance Handling,” “Secrets of a Successful Organizer,” “Union Solidarity with Immigrant Workers,” “Race and Labor,” and “What to do When Your Union Breaks Your Heart.”

Socialist Rebirth

If the Rand School and the Jefferson School thrived during the golden years of American working-class radicalism, Labor Notes carried on that educational mission in the straitened period of trade union decline and political reaction. The premise of the newborn Academy for Socialist Education is that we may be entering a new era of socialist rebirth. Evidence of that begins with the remarkable growth of DSA over the past decade. Early enthusiasm for the academy’s first courses encourages that optimism.

We are a long way from the “Peoples’ House” and the “Jeff.” And it’s unclear whether the Donald Trump victory presents an obstacle for rebuilding the Left or an opportunity or both. But one sure way of growing the socialist movement and waging the war for hegemony is through revolutionary education.