Ferrer Center and Colony
Their headquarters, the Ferrer Center, hosted a variety of cultural events in the avant-garde arts and radical politics, including lectures, discussions, and performances.
The resulting Ferrer movement led to the founding of anticlerical private schools in the model of his Escuela Moderna throughout the world.
The association lasted over 40 years[1] and had three goals: to promote Ferrer's writings, to organize meetings on the anniversary of his death, and to establish schools by his model throughout the United States.
[1] The Association's headquarters, the Ferrer Center, hosted a variety of cultural events: literary lectures, debates on current affairs, avant-garde arts and performance, social dances, and classes for the inquisitive masses.
On the weekends, the Center hosted speakers for discussion including journalist Hutchins Hapgood, poet Edwin Markham, and reporter Lincoln Steffens.
[6] Others associated with the Center included Max Weber, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
The group performed new manuscripts, including a world premiere of a Lord Dunsany drama, as well as their own original plays, which had social themes.
Historian Laurence Veysey described the Center, with its unrestricted discussions on social subjects and wide representation of nationalities, as potentially the country's least inhibited and most stimulating small venue at the time.
[2] It hosted children from the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, supported Frank Tannenbaum's 1914 mobilization of the unemployed, and fed protesters.
[3] The Center's formation coincided with a resurgence of interest in radical politics: the rise of syndicalism, multiple revolutions (including Russia), and strike actions.
While assimilation had eroded immigrant interest in radical politics for several decades, with this optimistic turn, anarchism had begun to escape the stigma of the 1901 McKinley assassination.
[6] The social foundation of the New York Ferrer movement was the relationship between Jewish immigrants, who valued education, and domestic Americans, who approached teaching with alacrity.
[10] Gallerist Carl Zigrosser wrote of the Center expanding his understanding of New York society beyond the knowledge he had received from books.
[12] The Center served as a model for schools across the United States in Chicago, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
The New York school's founders were propelled by their sense of injustice at Ferrer's execution and their belief in the liberatory prospect of his approach, but they made no concerted effort to replicate his example.
[14] The founders had little experience with education or parenting, apart from some having taught in the Workmen's Circle radical Sunday Schools,[13] and trusting no authority, would hold long debates with no effect.
[14] The day school teacher was not expected to uphold a religious or social dogma but instead to "have the libertarian spirit" and answer children's questions truthfully.
The Center's original location at 6 St. Mark's Place was established in haste and could not house a day school for lack of outdoor play space and park access.
[14] This location had an outdoor play space but the building continued to lack standard school equipment and was less accessible to radical families, so the school moved farther north in October 1912 to an older building in East Harlem, 63 East 107th Street, which had a stronger immigrant population and rested three blocks from Central Park.
Historian Laurence Veysey attributes this rise to the expressiveness and love shared between students and their teachers,[16] and to a cultural "union of enthusiasms" in the Ferrer movement, in which new Jewish immigrants, whose families tended towards warm affection and interest in education, met a body of Americans who equally wanted to be their teachers.
The day school's students were predominantly from immigrant, garment industry worker families with radical or anarchist politics.
They were possibly propelled by their interest in upending the status quo, altruism for the poor, and a curiosity for bohemian life in the ghetto, as juxtaposed against their urban, predictable upper-middle class lives.
[1] Of its accomplishments, Veysey counted the association of (1) college-educated native Americans with recent, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, and of (2) intellectuals with laborers.
