American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ was one who did understand the workers and did understand labor organization: that was A. J. Muste. There is no man in the United States that I would rather go on the picket line with where there is real danger of getting heads cracked.’’⁷¹

      For Muste’s part, he felt a ‘‘very strong’’ sense of identification with men like Sidney Hillman, Carlo Tresca, Arturo Giovannitti, Abraham Cahan, and other ethnic leaders and workers with whom he had become closely connected, and his impression was that they felt the same toward him. His early experiences of poverty and factory work gave him empathy for ‘‘the conditions under which they had to live, the suffering which they had to undergo, the deprivation,’’ and conditioned him to live simply. Like them, he also enjoyed the camaraderie of East Side coffeehouses and union meetings, often one and the same, though his Protestant heritage made him ‘‘congenitally’’ unable to sit around drinking and playing cards. ‘‘I had to get my relaxation going to plays or listening to music, and so when the boys went out to drink I didn’t go along.’’ Yet he refused to moralize, reflecting a deeply held conviction that idealists, whether religious or secular, should keep their ideals to themselves in a diverse and multifaceted movement.⁷²

      Ultimately, Muste found the experience of being part of something larger than the self deeply satisfying, a sentiment that contrasts with the strongly libertarian bent of other pacifists. Like other pragmatists, he believed that the individual could only find himself or herself through and in community rather than over and against it. ‘‘There is no such thing as an individual,’’ Muste explained years later in his oral history. ‘‘He’s a part of a community, a society’’ and has responsibilities to it.⁷³

      In 1920–21, as Muste watched the ATWA collapse all around him, he came to believe that the labor movement should combat not only the conservatism of the AFL, but also the increasingly out-of-touch insurrectionary politics of the left. Radicals had fallen ‘‘into the formulation of rules, orthodoxies,’’ escaping into ‘‘dogmatic radicalism’’ rather than facing ‘‘life and reality.’’⁷⁴ Indeed, one reason the postwar Red Scare was so devastating to the labor movement was that the Palmer raids tended to exacerbate the left’s millenarianism; from 1919 to 1921, anarchists entered a conspiracy to avenge their repression, the Socialist Party split into rival right- and left-wing factions, and the subsequently formed Communist Party went underground. These insurrectionary politics deeply affected the ATWA. Union meetings often centered on ‘‘doctrinal disputations’’ rather than ‘‘straight-out trade union organization of the workers for the immediate improvement of their conditions.’’ More dramatically, anarchists in textile centers bungled several bombings and the union’s Communist Party members became scarce.⁷⁵

      Muste’s decision to leave the ATWA and turn to workers’ education emerged out of this context. It was clear to him that labor’s expansive vision for the postwar order had been defeated and that the United States had entered a period of reaction. Yet he found reason to be hopeful. John Golden, the UTW’s reactionary president, died in 1921 and was replaced by Thomas McMahon, a more progressive unionist who reached out to Muste and who would fight closely with progressives in the 1922 New England textile strike. Perhaps the ATWA had served its purpose in spurring the UTW into more aggressive action; ‘‘for the time being,’’ a more practical approach was to push for a federation of textile unions under the auspices of the UTW. At any rate, the ‘‘extraordinary instability’’ of textiles, the specter of an economic downturn, and the extreme hostility of textile magnates made dual unionism now seem like a suicidal policy.⁷⁶ Meanwhile, workers’ education became a means whereby he could build a culture of industrial unionism within the American working class, which his experience within the ATWA had taught him would be no easy task. As he reflected, building class consciousness and organizing workers required more than an ‘‘evangelistic’’ method of intensive organization campaigns, big strikes, and generating popular enthusiasm; it was a long-term educational and cultural project. It might also serve as a means whereby he could press his vision for a more realistic left, on the one hand, and a more idealistic labor movement, on the other.⁷⁷

      Progressive unionists and independent radicals throughout the United States shared Muste’s deep interest in workers’ education. The needle and clothing trades were especially supportive, having initiated cultural and educational programs for their members, but so too were the machinists, mine workers and railroad brotherhoods, and central labor councils. James H. Maurer, a machinist who had risen to the presidency of the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor, was one of its most passionate advocates. Mortified by the pro-war, pro-corporate, nationalistic stance of the schools during World War I, Maurer became convinced that labor needed ‘‘schools of its own . . . for free and open discussion, from the workers’ point of view, of the social and economic questions that are of vital interest to workingmen.’’ Other prominent backers of the movement included John Brophy, the president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) District 2, who served as a center of insurgency against the autocratic leadership of John L. Lewis, and the venerable John Fitzpatrick, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor and partisan of third-party organizing efforts.⁷⁸ Their organ was the left-labor monthly Labor Age; its statement of purpose encapsulates the ideology of these labor pragmatists: ‘‘Presenting all facts about American labor—Believing that the goal of the American labor movement lies in industry for service, with workers’ control.’’ Its aim was to serve the labor movement by dealing ‘‘with the acts and thoughts of labor, without regard to dogma.’’⁷⁹

      Intellectuals, educators, and pacifists joined these progressive laborites in support of workers’ education. Boston’s Trade Union College could boast that its teachers included Felix Frankfurter and Harold Laski of Harvard University. The journalist Arthur Gleason was a particularly zealous backer, as were the historian Charles A. Beard and Bryn Mawr’s president M. Carey Thomas, both of whom had traveled to England where they had observed an active and flourishing movement. When they returned to the United States, Beard taught classes for the Rand School of Social Science and the ILGWU, while Thomas founded Bryn Mawr’s famous summer school for women workers. By the spring of 1921, there was enough sentiment to host a conference of two hundred supporters at the New York School for Social Research. Noting that at least twenty-six workers’ education ‘‘enterprises’’ serving some ten thousand students had been established in just two years, the conference voted to found the Workers’ Education Bureau (WEB) as a national clearinghouse for research, teaching, publication, and extension work in workers’ education.⁸⁰

      The movement’s nascent philosophy embraced the experimental, nondogmatic approach of progressive education, while rejecting its individualism. As one proponent put it, academics and liberals implicitly viewed education from a ‘‘middle-class point of view’’ with their tendency to ‘‘substitute ‘higher spiritual or cultural objectives’ ’’ for the ‘‘ ‘materialistic’ outlook’’ of workers and trade unions. Workers’ education, by contrast, aimed to educate workers to serve their unions and their class, not to educate them out of their class with bourgeois ideals of individualism and upward mobility.⁸¹ Reflecting this perspective, the curriculum of early workers’ education programs was largely limited to subjects considered directly useful to workers, such as the English language, trade union instrumentals, and the social sciences, which included sociology, economics, history, and some literature. At this early stage, literature and the arts were seen as something the workers already had access to as human beings, not as an additional ‘‘front’’ in the struggle for ‘‘a new social order.’’⁸²

      Still, enthusiasts of workers’ education remained on the political left. Unlike the conservative trade unionists they had battled for supremacy during the war, their ultimate goal was a socialist society, and they believed that workers’ education could help them achieve it. As Fannia Cohn of the ILGWU explained, workers’ education must be ‘‘flexible, experimental, and reflective of the interests of the groups involved,’’ while also having a ‘‘central ideology’’ of unifying the working class to achieve СКАЧАТЬ