New York Workers School

For more than two decades the facility played an important role in the teaching of party doctrine to the organization's functionaries, as well as offering a more general educational program to trade union activists.

)[5] The revolutionary socialist Communist wing, on the other hand, was rapidly driven underground by successive raids throughout late 1919 and early 1920 conducted at the behest of the Lusk Committee and the Justice Department.

This effort was met with success, as a majority of the Finnish Socialist Federation, the Workers Council group, and others previously opposed to underground political activity flocked to the new organization.

[10] The facility moved yet again to a permanent home located at 35 East 12th Street — a building said by one FBI informant to be so "dingy, makeshift, and old" that it "should have been condemned".

[5] The school occasionally published its own cheap editions of Marxist "classics" or issued its own textbooks, including one by leading Yiddish-language Communist Moissaye Olgin.

[12] This teaching method, borrowed from a small set of elite liberal arts colleges in the New England region,[13] was intended to shift the responsibility for learning to the students themselves.

[15] Workers in shoe, garment, and jewelry manufacturing as well as the building trades were particularly well represented, as were students having jobs in restaurants and retail shops.

[15] The school launched its own magazine, The Student-Worker, in February 1927, with members of the Student Council serving as the editorial staff of the publication.

[20] It was noted in October 1929 that the New York Workers School also maintained a Ruthenberg Library and reading room, which was open nightly from 6:30 until 9:30 pm.

[15] Although the bulk of the New York Workers School's operations were conducted at its main facility, small branch campuses were periodically added in order to improve accessibility.

[23] In the estimation of one historian, for all its advocacy of political militance by the staff of the New York Workers School, the actual outcome was mild:Anticommunist ideologues entertained lurid fantasies of party cadres stepping right out from a classroom discussion of one of Lenin's pamphlets and violently assaulting the U.S. Government.

But, despite the rhetoric of direct action, and student-staff willingness to apply communist doctrines on the streets, on picket lines, or in union struggles, there is no evidence that would suggest that the Workers School, or any other party educational enterprise, was some U.S. equivalent of the Smolny Institute, the academy from which the Russian Bolsheviks made their successful armed seizure of state power in 1917.

"[5]The New York Workers School was emulated by the Communist Party on a smaller scale in other key American industrial cities during the period of its greatest strength, the late 1930s and early 1940s.

He was a big, unhappy Irishman, who lived sadly in the shadow of his celebrated brother, Liam, the author of The Informer and The Assassin.