participated in the great strikes of the war years. Few of them had formal education, having left school as soon as they were legally permitted to work, and were eager to learn. As dedicated trade unionists, they sought practical skills that would help them to strengthen their unions and the labor movement. As one student explained, ‘‘the problems uppermost in my mind since I came to Brookwood relate to the failure of the Metal Trades campaign waged last summer [in Pittsburgh]. . . . Why did the campaign fail . . . [and] to find a method whereby it is possible to stir the spirit of the rank and file in the interest of the labor movement.’’ Students further appreciated the opportunity to meet unionists from other cultures and trades, though these interactions could also be fraught with ethnic and cultural tensions.116
Len De Caux provides an account of Brookwood that is suggestive of its deeper meaning for the students who arrived there. ‘‘Brookwood was beautiful. . . . To the miner, Brookwood was green, clean, all above ground—no coal dust, no cricks in the back. To the machinist, Brookwood was greaseless days far from the grinding roar of metal against metal. To makers of suits, dresses, hats, Brookwood was a fairytale country to which they were wand-wafted from the square, treeless hills, the trash-strewn cement valleys of Manhattan or Chicago. To those who had known poverty, Brookwood offered ease, security, the fresh-air pleasures of the well-to-do.’’ The seasons were sharply defined, with ‘‘clear and crisp’’ air in the fall, sledding and frozen-over ponds for skating in the winter, and ‘‘fat, bursting buds, sun-dimpled rivulets, baby-green grass’’ in the spring that set the stage for romantic dalliances. Indeed, ‘‘Brookwood was coeducation at close quarters’’; with the average Brookwood student unmarried and in his or her late twenties, romances flowered in the context of intellectual and political stimulation and debate. The overall effect was the spiritual expression of ‘‘a labor movement in microcosm—without bureaucrats or racketeers—with emphasis on youth, aspiration, ideals.’’117
By 1925–26, the college was flourishing. Under Muste’s able leadership, Brookwood had secured stable financing, improved living and working conditions on campus, and initiated a Building and Endowment Fund to further improve and expand the campus. Its graduates had assumed key roles within their unions as organizers, labor journalists, and educators, while its new students emanated a confidence borne from their status as second-generation immigrants.118 As we have seen, by 1924, the AFL had ‘‘warmly’’ embraced workers’ education.
Relations with the Communist Party were also relatively harmonious at mid-decade. At one point, in 1924, party leader Earl Browder accused the school of Fabian elitism, but generally it was believed that ‘‘good Communists can go to Brookwood and come out better Communists.’’ Party members attended the college through their unions, Brookwood faculty were invited to teach at the Communist Party’s Workers’ School in New York, and leaders of the party occasionally lectured at the college. It almost seemed possible that the college might serve as a fulcrum for the reconciliation between left and right, intellectuals and workers, within the movement.119
As Brookwood matured, so did its theoretical understanding of the role of education and culture under capitalism. In the college’s early years, it tended to view itself as a medium for communicating expert knowledge to workers. By mid-decade, however, it increasingly saw itself as a site where working-class knowledge was produced. As Muste explained in 1927, knowledge about industry and labor was already ‘‘in the heads of the men and women who have been doing the practical work of the [labor] movement.’’ The problem was that it had not ‘‘been written down anywhere.’’ Brookwood thus offered workers the opportunity to ‘‘to think carefully, comprehensively, critically’’ about their experiences and problems through collaboration with other workers and ‘‘experts.’’ Meanwhile, Brookwood graduates and faculty disseminated that knowledge for the benefit of the labor movement through educational initiatives within their unions, articles in the labor press, pamphlets, and books. In these forums, labor educators presented their views and subject matter in a problem-centered format, as starting points for discussion, rather than as truths handed down from above.120
In part, Brookwood’s evolving teaching philosophy grew out of its half decade of experience teaching adult workers. But it was also a response to the growing sophistication of capital in the 1920s. The full-scale employer assault on organized labor in the early 1920s had given way ‘‘to the gentler methods of paternalistic welfare capitalism.’’ Although its emergence was uneven, welfare capitalism sought to develop a ‘‘harmony of interests’’ between the worker and the company through employee representation plans (‘‘company unionism’’), fringe benefits and higher wages, as well as through educational and cultural programs. This was part of a larger project to modernize business methods; just as Frederick Winslow Taylor brought efficiency and rationality to production, corporations sought to do the same with personnel.121 Muste was deeply concerned about these developments, and his evolving views of workers’ education must be placed in this context. ‘‘The boss is not afraid of education,’’ Muste often pointed out. Newly formed schools of business management ‘‘used expert service of all kinds’’ to train managers in the skills of industrial efficiency, de-skilling, and company unionism. Unless the labor movement shed its residual anti-intellectualism, he warned, the social sciences would continue to be used in antilabor ways.122
The advent of mass culture and its reshaping of working-class culture and institutions further concerned Muste. He read Robert and Helen Lynd’s book Middletown with great interest, observing that the automobile meant that many workers no longer lived near their places of employment, which ‘‘makes it harder to bring them together for organization purposes.’’ This development, ‘‘together with the radio, movies and other modern ways of recreation and spending leisure time, is cutting down attendance at union meetings.’’123
Rather than adopt a defensive posture, however, Muste called for engagement and appropriation of the new mass culture within the values of the labor movement. Modern methods of propaganda—such as ‘‘modern psychology, advertising, and religious revivalism’’—and the new media of mass communication might be utilized to win ‘‘individuals and the masses’’ to the labor movement. Indeed, culture might be an important front in the struggle for a socialist society.124 The union had to be the primary working-class institution because ‘‘the basic fact about a worker is that he is a worker’’ and all of his ‘‘human relations depend upon that fact.’’ But it was also important for labor to create its own history, literature, art, and drama. ‘‘When Labor undertakes to write and produce its own movies, to do its own radio broadcasting,’’ Muste opined, ‘‘then it gives notice that it expects to do its own dreaming henceforth. . . . And this is of great importance, for the dreams that men dream, the visions that they see, probably have far more to do than their abstract thinking in determining how they shall vote and act.’’125
Other labor progressives shared Muste’s interest in culture, taking an approach that differentiated them from their modernist contemporaries and that anticipated the left’s engagement with the popular and vernacular arts in the 1930s. Throughout the 1920s, organized workers explored the possibilities of counter-institution building and culture as ways to inculcate the ethics of the labor movement in workers and their families. The AFL’s schemes like labor banking and life insurance have often been interpreted as evidence of its ‘‘class collaborationist’’ character during this decade, but it might be more fruitful to interpret them as a conservative manifestation of a much larger and diverse cultural project that included education, cooperative experiments, drama, radio programs, summer camps, and youth groups. One such program, Pioneer Youth, with which Muste was closely connected, was conceived as labor’s alternative to the militaristic and patriotic culture of the Boy Scouts. It aimed to instill social idealism, a cooperative spirit, and knowledge of the labor movement in working-class children, but in a nondogmatic and playful atmosphere so that workers children would ‘‘become critical, independent, [and] creative.’’126
Brookwood’s
