American Gandhi. Leilah Danielson

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СКАЧАТЬ sports,’’ volleyball, baseball, hiking, tennis, and horseshoe pitching, to foster physical health and working-class solidarity.¹²⁷ It also broadened its curriculum to include elective courses in subjects like social psychology, current events, labor journalism, literature, and dramatics. The Brookwood Review announced these changes in December 1925 with a modernized format and a lively lead article: ‘‘Can that most dramatic movement in the world, the Labor Movement, be dramatized? And dramatized . . . by the workers themselves? Can the workers, in dramatizing the movement for the world, bring home to their own consciousness the scope and possibilities of the movement? Can they, in effect, create a form of drama characteristic of the new proletarian spirit in production?’’¹²⁸

      As this quote suggests, labor theater proved the most popular with students and faculty. The new drama teacher, Jasper Deeter of the Provinceton Playhouse, oversaw student writing and production. Like the proletarian cultural production of the 1930s, these plays mixed proletarian realism and modernism, while also drawing upon the formulas of mass culture. While often rather simplistic, they reflected students’ actual experiences; one of the authors of the play Shades of Passaic had been beaten by the police for participating in an ACW-led strike.¹²⁹

      Brookwood faculty also wrote and produced plays. Tom Tippett, a former miner who was hired to teach economics in 1927 and later became the school’s extension director, published Mill Shadows, a dramatization of how one company town was transformed into a union community.¹³⁰ Helen Norton, the school’s journalism instructor, wrote a number of plays, one of which was a satire of a faculty meeting that reveals much about the culture and politics of Brookwood during this dynamic period. In the play, Muste introduces the meeting agenda, stating that they need to plan Brookwood’s economy. Cara Cook, the school’s librarian and tutor, responds, ‘‘I thought what we wanted was a revolution, not a planned economy.’’ Yet, to meet costs, they must figure out how to reduce the number of students. One faculty member suggests eliminating students who ‘‘get second helpings in the dining room.’’ After realizing that this would eliminate nearly every student, another suggests cutting ‘‘out one student from each political wing represented at the school.’’ But that solution is also seen as impractical since it would mean that ‘‘practically everybody would leave, and the few left would have far too much harmony in the class room.’’ At one point, David Saposs offers to economize by not teaching his classes. Eventually, they decide to host a ‘‘bazaar,’’ but then immediately start debating how to raise money, the gradual approach or the big campaign, metaphorically discussing the best means of organizing workers. Throughout, the meeting is interrupted by phone calls from various creditors and labor contacts, as well as by Connie Muste, who asks her father for a pencil for her history test the next morning.

      The play speaks to ‘‘the spirit of fellowship’’ and ‘‘dear love of comrade’’ that Brookwood sought to inculcate, while its humor serves to release tensions over the perennial challenge of fund-raising, quality of the food, heating problems, and gender; in one scene, when Muste is told that the furnace in the women’s dormitory might blow up and destroy the labor posters the students had made, he responds, ‘‘Well, it would get rid of the women students, and I’d give a poster a day to get that problem off my hands.’’¹³¹

      Brookwood faculty and students performed these plays, along with labor songs, poems, and lectures on a variety of topics in traveling ‘‘labor chautauquas’’ that raised money for the school and for various strike funds, while also educating workers in the history and culture of unionism.¹³² Yet this cultural turn brought criticism from some quarters that suggested that it would divert working-class militants from the urgent task of industrial organization.¹³³ As a result, culture remained secondary to the college’s main purpose of training trade unionists to more effectively serve the labor movement. The college’s refusal to hire V. F. Calverton, the editor of the modernist literary magazine Modern Quarterly, as a full-time instructor of literature reveals the dominant place practical courses on trade unionism and the social sciences held in Brookwood’s curriculum. As Muste explained of the college’s decision to only employ him on a part-time basis, ‘‘we are specializing in getting men and women whose interests are not primarily cultural or scholarly but who are practical people who . . . are going to do the practical work of the trade union movement.’’ Perhaps when Brookwood became a full-scale ‘‘labor university,’’ it would be able to hire Calverton on a full-time basis.¹³⁴

      Muste’s dreams for Brookwood and the labor movement thus remained expansive, despite his moderate posture and practical orientation during this period. Between the poles of revolutionary socialist and loyal trade unionist was a pragmatist who recognized the importance of being flexible and adaptable to changing conditions. In the early 1920s, those conditions were corporate intransigence, a hostile state, a conservative labor movement, and a decimated left, all of which made education and conciliation with the AFL seem imperative. Pragmatism also gave Muste a language for reconciling his individualism with his allegiance to the working class; with its emphasis on cooperation and action as the path to freedom, pragmatism helped to temper his sense of historical destiny as a prophet of nonviolence and human brotherhood. Yet those ideals remained deeply important to him. As economic and political conditions changed, and as the labor movement and the far left remained resistant to his efforts at reconciliation, even going so far as to publicly attack and vilify him, he would revise his ideas about how to strengthen the labor movement and build a socialist America.

      CHAPTER 4

      Muste, Workers’ Education, and Labor’s Culture War in the 1920s

      The most ominous fact confronting us is that the labor movement in this country does not have a policy, a voice, an ideal of its own.

      —A. J. Muste, 1930

      AS BROOKWOOD GREW, so did Muste’s stature in the labor movement. By mid-decade, he was firmly established as a central figure within labor’s progressive wing. Among a myriad of other honors and activities, he was called in to advise and mediate strikes, particularly those involving textile workers; invited to speak on workers’ education and other topics to unions and central labor bodies throughout the country; elected a vice president of the AFT and as vice president of the National Association for Child Development; served as a member of the Central Trades and Labor Council of Greater New York and as a member of the executive board of the Workers’ Education Bureau; and served on the editorial board of Labor Age.¹ He also published widely, with articles appearing in Labor Age, the Survey, the Nation, the World Tomorrow, the New Leader, the International Trade Union Review, the American Federationist, and the Modern Quarterly, among other publications.

      During this period, Muste’s primary allegiance was to the labor movement, and his pragmatic approach makes it difficult to discern the dedicated Christian pacifist of the war years. Still, he remained committed to nonviolence and civil liberties; he served on the executive committee of the national FOR, chairing that committee from 1926 through 1929, and continued to serve on the national committee of the ACLU.² His political agenda in the 1920s can also be interpreted as an expression of his pacifism, as he focused on promoting mutual understanding between radicals and conservatives in the labor movement and engendering a pragmatic spirit; labor must approach its problems ‘‘calmly, objectively, ready to cast aside old ideas and methods and to adopt new ones if necessary, willing to experiment,’’ Muste frequently asserted.³ His refusal to engage in ad hominem attacks offers further evidence of his pacifism, and it served to attract those who were eager to transcend the increasingly divided political culture of the labor movement and the left in the 1920s.

      Descriptions of Muste from this period describe him as ‘‘happy’’ and even-tempered, СКАЧАТЬ