New York Workers School

The Communist Party's National Agit-Prop Director Bertram D. Wolfe headed the New York Workers School throughout the 1920s.

The New York Workers School, colloquially known as "Workers School," was an ideological training center of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) established in New York City in October 1923. 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.

The Workers School was a model for local CPUSA training centers in other American cities. It also provided the direct inspiration for the New Workers School, established by the breakaway Communist Party (Majority Group) headed by Jay Lovestone and Benjamin Gitlow after they left the Communist Party in 1929.

The Workers School was dissolved through merger in 1944, becoming part of the CPUSA's Jefferson School of Social Science.

History

Background

Over the course of the spring and summer of 1919 the Socialist Party of America divided into competing Socialist and Communist wings.[1] In the aftermath of this bitter split, the electorally-oriented Socialists retained control of a number of key public institutions of the party, including the Rand School of Social Science, a trade union and party training facility located in New York City.[2]

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.[3] With the country in the throes of the First Red Scare, the various organizations of the Communist movement eked out a furtive underground existence.

At the end of 1921 a decision was made by key party leaders, approved and driven ahead by the Communist International, for the Communist Party of America (CPA) to emerge from its underground existence of secret meetings and pseudonyms and to attempt to re-establish itself as a public organization known as the Workers Party of America (WPA). 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. Membership soared from barely over 4,000 in the old underground CPA in 1922 to more than 15,000 in the legal WPA in 1923.[4]

The presence of such a large body of new members in the American Communist movement presented a challenge for the group of core cadres, as the understanding of party ideology by many of these new members was seen as defective. With the Rand School firmly in the grasp of the WPA's hated rivals, the need for a new party training school was seen as a pressing order of the day.

Establishment

By October 1923 a new Communist Party training school had been readied — the New York Workers School.[5] The facility was first located on University Place, before being moved to Communist headquarters at 28 E Fourteenth Street in New York City's Lower East Side.[5] The facility was moved yet again to a permanent home located at 35 East Twelfth Street — a building said by one FBI informant to be so "dingy, makeshift, and old" that it "should have been condemned."[5]

As with the rival Rand School of Social Science, the Workers School attempted to train trade union activists as well as key party cadres as part of what historian Marvin E. Gittleman has called "a systematic effort to mobilize learning to support the workers' side in the class struggle."[6] The teaching staff took pains to stress a close connection between learning and action, with a view to a hastening of the overthrow of capitalism.[6]

Curriculum

Each term at the school began with publication of an "Announcement of Classes."[7] The school launched in the fall of 1923 with a total of 12 courses as part of its curriculum, including Marxism, the history of international workers' movement, tactics of the Communist International, as well as "Biologic and Social Evolution."[7] In addition, courses in elementary and advanced English were offered for the benefit of the Communist movement's largely immigrant membership, as well as courses on "speech improvement" (the elimination of accents) and "platform speaking."[7]

Courses were conducted at night so that workers could remain on the job without interruption of their lives and financial loss. Workers School class announcements from the 1930s indicate that two successive class blocks ran each night, one running from 7:00 to 8:30 pm, followed by another group of classes meeting from 8:40 to 10:10 pm.[8] Classes were offered at the Workers School every weekday evening although most met only once or twice per week, with Tuesday being the night of the lightest course offerings.[8]

By 1927 the number of courses offered by the school had tripled, including courses on "Citizenship and Naturalization," labor journalism, and the creation and operation of shop newspapers, among others.[7] The school's "core course," entitled "Fundamentals of Communism," was taught in six different classes, including a day course for workers on the night shift.[9] By the middle 1930s as many as 50 sections in this key course were offered at the Workers School and in satellite classrooms around New York City.[9]

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.[9]

Instructors

Director of the Workers School in the late 1920s was Bertram D. Wolfe, assisted by Ben Davidson (politician) (better known by his "party name," D. Benjamin).[10] Both of these taught at the Workers School in a full-time capacity, and both would leave the Communist Party with expelled leader Jay Lovestone in 1929, taking up work at the so-called New Workers School established by the rival Communist political organization which they helped found.

As the Communist Party was an organization dominated by intellectuals, the Workers School administrators had a host of prominent instructors from which to draw course instructors. Among those serving on the school's advisory council were labor historian David Saposs, former Industrial Workers of the World organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and left wing novelists Floyd Dell and John Dos Passos.[7] Others teaching Workers School courses included economics professor Scott Nearing, trade union activist Benjamin Gitlow, Juliet Poyntz, German language newspaper editor Ludwig Lore, writer Elizabeth Lawson, historian Herbert Aptheker, and prominent black academic Doxey A. Wilkerson.[11]

Top Communist Party leaders would also periodically teach advanced courses or give special lectures to key students of the school, with Earl Browder lecturing on the Chinese Revolution and William Z. Foster on trade union issues, among others.[7]

Following the expulsion of founding Director Bert Wolfe and Assistant Director Ben Davidson from the CPUSA in 1929, the New York Workers School was directed by Abraham Markoff, a New York pharmacist.[12] Another change was necessitated when Markoff died in 1938, however, and veteran party leader Will Weinstone was called upon to take over the Workers School's chief administrative position.[12]

Tuition and participation

In the estimation of the leading academic expert on the New York Workers School, the institution was largely self-supporting, with student tuition providing funds for the payment of modest salaries to the part-time teaching staff.[13] The cost of a 12 week course meeting once a week at the time of the Workers School's launch in 1923 was $3.50.[13] This fee was raised to $4 in 1927, with twice-weekly classes in English language instruction priced at $6 for the 12 week term.[13] Reduced fees were available to trade unions and various other fraternal organizations seeking to sponsor students on scholarship.[13]

A core teaching staff taught between 10 and 15 classes a week in exchange for a weekly salary of $12 — an amount which was insufficient to cover the costs of life in New York City.[14] Pressure was placed upon instructors to maintain enrollment in the school by conducting classes in a lively style as for both political and economic reasons high enrollment levels by the Workers School's administration.[14]

Admission to the New York Workers School was not limited to members of the Communist Party and its youth section, the Young Communist League, but also included non-party students.[15] Indeed, the Workers School was envisioned not only as a training center but as a means of recruiting talented and sympathetic individuals into the Communist Party.[15] Students at the school were mostly of working class origin and were often immigrants to the United States.[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]

Participation topped the 1,000 student mark in the fall of 1926.[7] Annual attendance at the peak of the CPUSA's educational effort was approximately 5,000 students.[16] Eventually the Workers School would open up satellite schools in the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, and in several New Jersey industrial towns across from New York City on the other side of the Hudson River.[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.[17] Content of the magazine's first issue included a contribution by Bertram D. Wolfe, Director of the Workers School, as well as material produced by students on the aims of the school, teaching methods, and the selection of course topics.[17]

In the fall of 1929 participation was pegged at "over 1200," of whom about 20 percent were enrolled in basic English classes and the rest taking courses in history, politics, or other party training courses.[18] This represented a new record enrollment for the institution.[19]

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.[18] A campus newspaper was also launched at that date, Workers' School Journal, which was to be run under student management and to publish contributions made by students at the school.[19]

Branch campuses

Although the bulk of operations of the New York Workers School was conducted at its main facility, small branch campuses were periodically added in order to improve accessibility. In the fall of 1929 the Communist Party operated a "Bronx Branch of the Workers' School," located at 2700 Bronx Park East.[18] A total of 60 students began the fall term at that location.[18]

Dissolution

The Workers School was absorbed by the Jefferson School of Social Science in 1944 — a parallel Communist Party adult educational institution.[14]

Legacy

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."[20]

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.[21]

Former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers mentioned the Workers School (which he called the "Workers Center") in his memoirs:

Behind Comrade Angelica sat Comrade Tom O'Flaherty. 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 . He drank heavily, and I have sometimes seen him lying, stiff and foul, in front of the Workers Center on Union Square.[22]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The most accessible treatment of this sometimes confusing factional war remains Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957.
  2. ↑ Historian Marvin E. Gettleman makes clear that the Workers School was seen by the Communists as the "historic successor" of the Socialists' Rand School. See: Marvin E. Gettleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944: Communist Education in American Society," in Michael E. Brown et al., New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993; pg. 262.
  3. ↑ See: Draper, The Roots of American Communism, passim.
  4. ↑ Tim Davenport, "The Communist Party of America (1919-1946): Membership Figures," Early American Marxism website, www.marxisthistory.org/
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Gettleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 261.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 263.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 266.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 American Legion, Isms. Second Edition. Indianapolis, IN: American Legion, 1937. Reproduced in Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 269.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 267.
  10. ↑ Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pp. 262, 266.
  11. ↑ Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pp. 266-267.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Marv Gettleman, "Workers Schools," in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (eds.) Encyclopedia of the American Left. New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1990; pp. 853-854.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 271.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 272.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 Gettleman, "Workers Schools, pg. 854.
  16. ↑ Peter Filardo, "Guide to the Jefferson School of Social Science (New York, N.Y.) Records and Indexes," Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University, New York City, 2009.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "Workers' School Students Have Magazine; Interesting Article in First Issue," Daily Worker, vol. 4, no. 35 (Feb. 23, 1927), pg. 4.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 "1200 Attend Workers School," Daily Worker, vol. 6, no. 188 (Oct. 14, 1929), pg. 2.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Workers School Starts Second Week Tonight," Daily Worker, vol. 6, no. 189 (Oct. 15, 1929), pg. 2.
  20. ↑ Gittleman, "The New York Workers School, 1923-1944," pg. 273.
  21. ↑ Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic Books, 1984; pg. 372.
  22. ↑ Chambers, Whittaker (1952). Witness. New York: Random House. pp. 222–223.

Further reading

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