CHAPTER LXXXVII

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

We have noted Professor Egbert of the University of J. P. Morgan & Company, advising the workers to avail themselves of the existing college system—in other words, to let the capitalists do their educating for them. “Won’t you walk into my parlor? said the spider to the fly.” Just what labor education turns into when it is superintended by the existing educational authorities was amusingly demonstrated at Bryn Mawr, a very aristocratic college for women located near Philadelphia, and having the president of an insurance company for its treasurer, and for its grand duke the president of a steel company and a trust company, vice-president of a national bank and director of a sugar company.

We have seen President Thomas of Bryn Mawr branded in the Denver “Post” as a dangerous radical, and we now discover the basis of the charge; she started a movement to educate working girls! The idea was that the brightest and most promising members of labor unions should come to Bryn Mawr in the summer and be taught by professors from various colleges. This, of course, was a step in the right direction, and I have no desire to belittle it; though I should have liked to see the further provision that at the same time the young ladies of Bryn Mawr should take the places of the working girls in the factories.

I have no doubt whatever that this experiment was well meant; but in its working out it revealed the impossibility of honesty under our present class system. In raising money it was set forth that the purpose of the plan was to bring the working girls into touch with the cultured classes and break down the spirit of class consciousness. Then, after the money was got, it was necessary to get the girls; and so the unions were told that the purpose of the plan was to make the girls into more efficient and capable leaders of unions.

Bryn Mawr has received a heavy endowment from John D. Rockefeller; a hall is named for him, and also a gateway. The organizers of the summer school were getting up a prospectus telling of the plan, and they put on the cover a photograph, with the name “Rockefeller Gateway.” But at the last moment it occurred to someone that this might not look well to the unions, so the label “Rockefeller” was left off, and the photograph went out with the caption, “A Gateway.”

I met three different professors who were invited to come to Bryn Mawr and teach at this summer session; one of them, Professor H. W. L. Dana, whom we saw turned out of Columbia University as a scapegoat for the pacifism of Nicholas Miraculous. Professor Dana had an interview with President Thomas, in which the terms of the engagement were laid down to him. There were to be no social relationships with the working girls, no tennis dates, no activities outside the classes. His subject was to be literature, and he was to avoid dangerous writers, such as Morris, Whitman and Ruskin; he was to teach literature as art, and not as part of the labor movement.

On the train going home, Professor Dana decided that his academic dignity had been infringed upon; therefore he sent a telegram to President Thomas, saying that he was unable to agree to the terms. He sent a copy of this telegram to Rose Schneiderman, one of the working class leaders, who had been charged with selecting the girls: the effect of which procedure was instant collapse on the part of President Thomas. She wrote saying that Professor Dana had entirely misunderstood her, she had not intended anything of the sort. Dana had asked that there should be student representation on the board controlling the experiment, and President Thomas now said that she had had that idea in mind all along. So they provided a system of student representation, with an open vote, and the balance of power in the hands of Bryn Mawr graduates, who were helping at the summer school with the title of “tutors.” A harmless working girl, not a trades unionist, was selected as representative of the girls.

The union girls, of course, understood perfectly what was being done to them; they would smile to Professor Dana and say: “You must remember, they aren’t used to democracy. You must be gentle with them. You see, they haven’t suffered.” (Stop and think about that beautiful phrase!). The “tutors” would gossip among themselves, telling about funny mistakes which the working girls had made, such as not knowing to what century Shakespeare belonged. They would correct the table manners of the girls—and without ever thinking that the girls also had secret laughter over the mistakes of the “tutors.” Thus, some tutor had asked: “What do the letters A. F. of L. stand for?”—which seemed to the working girls quite as important a matter as the date of Shakespeare’s birth. One of the tutors asked: “Is the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union the same as the Third International?”—and that seemed the funniest thing in the world to these union girls.

More serious matters arose quickly; for you see, these girls have convictions, and take them just as seriously as Bryn Mawr girls take their table manners. The first thing they did was to go to the chambermaids and discover that these women there were working twelve and fourteen hours a day. They proceeded to organize the women, and the college authorities were confronted with a demand for an eight-hour day—which they granted! They granted a number of other things before they got through. Teaching economics and social science to union girls was quite a different matter from teaching it to the daughters of the leisure class. In the winter time Bryn Mawr professors can get by with formulas, but in these summer months they had to come down to brass tacks; for to these girls an economic theory meant some particular place, some particular set of circumstances: “When I was in such and such a shop,” or, “When I was on strike in New York!” This made an entirely new thing out of the subject of economics.

Also, it made a new thing out of literature. Professor Dana was selected to read poetry to the girls at chapel, and poetry, as we know, is an important source of culture. Dana read one or two poems on Russia, at which the dean in charge seemed shocked. She asked him to read poems at least a hundred years old. Dana thought it over, and answered that he would do so, and next morning he read in chapel two poems which were exactly a hundred years old—Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy,” and his

Men of England, wherefore plow For the lords who lay ye low?

This Bryn Mawr experiment was repeated last summer, with much hurrah in the newspapers; but needless to say, Harry Dana was not one of the teachers, and neither was a woman professor who proved too sympathetic to the working girls. Also a Bryn Mawr teacher, who “got the vision” from the girls, and prepared to teach some of them in the winter time, was omitted this year. Nevertheless, the leaven works, and two of the “tutors,” Bryn Mawr students, were arrested during the summer school term while picketing a clothing shop in Philadelphia, during a strike by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Once let the rich girls realize what the poor girls suffer, and some of the rich girls will protest!

I had a pleasant experience in Cambridge. I was guest in a home which is the shrine of pilgrims from all over the United States—that of New England’s favorite poet and Cambridge’s most eminent citizen, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Here lives the poet’s grandson, who is also a grandson of Richard Henry Dana, a born teacher, and incidentally a warm-hearted and most lovable man. Nicholas Murray Butler has not invited him back to Columbia; nor has it occurred to President Lowell to invite him to step around the corner from his home and lecture on the literature of social protest to Harvard students. Nevertheless, Harry Dana has found some teaching to do; he travels over to the Boston Labor College, and teaches workingmen. One Sunday morning I attended a committee meeting of this institution—several college professors and several labor leaders, conspiring in the home of the poet Longfellow to overturn academic authority in the United States!

Then I traveled across the continent to my home in Pasadena, and found that Professor John Scott had been kicked out of the Pasadena High School in the interests of one hundred percent reaction, and with the help of progressive labor leaders had started a workers’ college in Los Angeles. So it goes, in one city after another; any time a group of labor men want to save the brains of their young people, they can find a kicked-out professor; and any time a kicked-out professor is willing to cultivate his self-respect on a little oatmeal, he can manage to get together a group of class-conscious labor men, and can greatly increase his influence and effectiveness. When Dana was fired from Columbia, he lectured to classes of six and eight hundred people at the Rand School; while Scott Nearing assures me that continuously during the eight years since he parted from the University of Pennsylvania, he has had not merely larger audiences, but more serious and more interesting audiences.

## CHAPTER LXXXVIII

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!

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