Brookwood Labor College
[3] Adult education was considered by these organizations and individuals to be the key to promoting class consciousness and teaching the skills needed to challenge the power of employers.
On March 19, 1914, William Mann Fincke, a liberal clergyman and son of a coal mine owner, purchased the 53-acre (210,000 m2) Brookwood Estate in Katonah, New York, for $3,700.
[6] With financial assistance and organizational support from Robert W. Dunn, John Nevin Sayre, and Norman Thomas, Brookwood School opened in the fall of 1919.
Later board members included Fannia Cohn;[24][25] Cara Cook, Brookwood faculty member and librarian;[25] Robert Fechner, a vice president of the International Association of Machinists;[23][26] Gustav Geiges, president of the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers;[25][26] Fred Hewitt, editor of the Machinists' Monthly Journal;[23] Abraham Lefkowitz;[24][25] A.J.
Kennedy, president of the Amalgamated Lithographers of America;[24] Tom Tippett, Brookwood extension director;[25] and Phil Ziegler, editor of the official journal of the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks.
Fourth, that there is immediate need for a workers' college with a broad curriculum, located amid healthy country surroundings, where the students can completely apply themselves to the task at hand.
[42] Local business people, like Wappingers Falls laundry owner Harold Hatch,[45] and Fannia Cohn's brother, sister, and brother-in-law also contributed large sums.
[51] By 1937, the campus consisted of the main house, an administration building, the women's dormitory, seven cottages of five to 10 rooms each that could sleep for seven to 10 men, a six-car garage, and a number of outbuildings.
[86] Courses in economics emphasized the maldistribution of wealth, the problems of the free market, and the benefits of a socialism, while those in psychology discussed how best to approach workers in union organizing campaigns.
[14][47] Lawrence Rogin, who joined the school in 1934, was the journal's editor until 1937,[71][88] and students were encouraged to submit pieces for publication to sharpen the skills learned in class.
[14][56] Cooking, serving meals, farming the college's extensive vegetable gardens, chopping wood for fuel, and assisting with the food and work animals on the campus were also expected.
The college's educational efforts also included publication of a number of short, pragmatic pamphlets, worksheets, and booklets for workers to use in union organizing campaigns and strikes.
[56][93] In time, students from the agricultural, baking, carpentry, education, electronics manufacturing, food preparation, maritime, metalworking, painting, plumbing, railroad, retail, shoemaking, tailoring, taxicab, textile, upholstery, and woodworking sectors as well as the building trades.
That same year, the school (with financial assistance from the Workers' Education Bureau) began sending its students overseas to study at foreign labor colleges.
That year, the WEB had adopted resolutions and constitutional amendments that essentially prevented it from concerning itself "in any way with trade union politicies" and required it to function "strictly as an educational and research organization".
AFL President Samuel Gompers delivered a widely reported speech in which he accused the college of belonging to an "interlocking network" of more than 50 "pacifist and revolutionary organizations of a more or less extreme character".
In June, John Brophy, the mineworker and Brookwood director, forged an alliance with communists in and out of the Mine Workers to defeat Lewis in the upcoming union election.
[35] In April 1927, Green made a veiled threat against Brookwood in the pages of the AFL's magazine, The American Federationist, arguing that worker education should be a bulwark against rather than a fomenter of radicalism.
[35] Events came to a head the following month when Martin Ryan, president of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, showed Green a letter from a Canadian official in his union.
[35] The students further claimed that Brookwood had formally celebrated the anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union; placed pictures of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky throughout the school; and hung red banners (the symbol of the Communist Party) on holidays.
[109] Muste unwittingly provided Green with additional anti-Brookwood ammunition in April 1928 when he published an article in the left-wing journal Labor Age.
[107] On November 24, the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America asked the Executive Council to make its August 8 report public so that unions could judge for themselves the truthfulness and severity of the allegations made against the school.
[113] James B. Rankin, president of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, tried to undermine the Woll report by declaring Brookwood convicted by "uncertain evidence" and "without a trial or official charges".
He proposed establishing a network of communications among progressive leaders, organizations, and other groups within the American Federation of Labor, with the goal of creating a "militant though informal" national movement.
In 1932, he instructed Tippett to write a play dramatizing the plight of Southern textile workers, who were facing strikebreakers, employer-sponsored violence, and attacks by the National Guard.
[145] The board and Muste then spent several days discussing the future of Brookwood Labor College, the CPLA, the economic situation, and the best political response to take to the depression.
He also said Brookwood would return to a full educational program, which would involve not only resident training but also field activities, Chautauquas, summer institutes, and publications.
[156] James Maurer was reelected as president that year, and three individuals were hired as new faculty: Roy Reuther in extension studies; Lawrence Rogin in journalism and as editor of the Brookwood Review; and Ethel Lurie as librarian and tutor.
The board also blamed the rapid rise in the number of "little Brookwoods"—the education and theater programs of the Works Progress Administration (a federal agency which in part employed authors, musicians, and actors), unions (especially the CIO), and traditional colleges and universities.
[169] MacKaye left in 1926 to run a similar program for the United Mine Workers, and was replaced by Jasper Deeter, a director who had worked with Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill.
