Brookwood Labor College

BROOKWOOD LABOR COLLEGE. The foremost institution of the post-World War I workers’ education movement, Brookwood Labor College occupies an unusual place in the history of the American Left. Founded in 1921 by a group of left-wing labor officials and pro-labor intellectuals, throughout its sixteen-year history Brookwood was non-ideological, accepting as student adherents of various radical persuasions including anarchists, Socialists, Communists, and union dissidents, along with non-radicals, and encouraging “free and full discussion.” Brookwood’s curriculum included labor history and organization, English, labor journalism, economics, social psychology, comparative labor movements, and drama. A procession of notable guest speakers from the labor and political worlds visited regularly, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Roger Baldwin, and V.F. Calverton among many.

In its earliest years, the major criteria for admission for the two-year residential program at Brookwood’s fifty-three-acre campus near Katonah, New York (donated by a wealthy antiwar radical) was at least three years of industrial experience (most of those accepted had more) and recommendations certifying applicants’ commitment to the labor movement. Brookwood’s “chairman of the faculty” and leader from 1921 to 1933 was A.J. Muste, an anti-war minister who led the 1919 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike and tended towards a quasi-syndicalist belief in the social potential of labor (“the most vital and noble force of our time making for a good life for all,” he said in 1923). He and fellow members of the small faculty received a charter from the American Federation of Teachers as Workers Education Local 189, which hosted annual conferences at Brookwood that brought together educators from the urban labor colleges around the United States and the working women’s summer school programs at a number of women’s colleges.

Brookwood at first courted established unions and the conservative leadership of the American Federation of Labor(AFL) under Samuel Gompers and William Green, professing loyalty and an educational program “free of isms.” But as the AFL declined in numbers, Brookwood faculty and students began to join calls for more aggressive organization and industrial unionism in the pages of the independent monthly Labor Age and in public forums. In 1928 the AFL attacked Brookwood as pro-Communist and called on its constituent unions to withdraw their support, which many did. (Meanwhile, the Young Communist League scoffed at the AFL’s accusation by declaring that Brookwood was “no more Communist in spirit than the Executive Board of the AFL itself.”) Brookwood responded by sponsoring a “loyal opposition” organization called the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), which gradually took on the features of a left-wing party, chartering chapters and organizing Unemployed Leagues in the early Great Depression years. Faculty and students became directly involved in several important strikes of the period, particularly the Marion, North Carolina, textile strike of 1929 and the West Virginia Mine Worker sUnion strike in 1931. In 1933 the faculty split over these involvements, ending with Muste and others leaving to work full time for the CPLA, soon renamed the American Workers Party and popularly dubbed the “Musteites.”

In its final four years, its program now reduced from two years to one year, Brookwood hired and admitted more Socialist Party members, often with less industrial experience and more educational background than the students of the 1920s. Still, the school remained ecumenical and welcomed students with a range of political views. In 1937, suffering from the diminution of union support and Great Depression conditions, Brookwood closed, as did most of the interwar era’s workers’ education programs. It lived on in legend, with Staughton Lynd calling for the revival of “two, three, many Brookwoods” at Local 189’s Fiftieth anniversary conference in 1972, and union dissidents and activists to this day invoking its name.

Notable leftist Brookwood graduates included anarchist Rose Pesotta (1924-1926, later a vice-president of the ILGWU), Communist Len DeCaux (1922-1924, later the editor of the CIO News from 1935 to 1947), Pauli Murray (1936-1937, then in her brief Lovestoneite phase before her long years as a labor, civil rights, and women’s rights activist), and Socialist Roy Reuther (1934-1935, prior to his years as a UAW leader). Five “Brookwooders” served in the Spanish Civil War, including Austrian-born Socialist Paul Niepold, a Brookwood graduate and staff member killed in battle in 1937. Most of Brookwood’s 450 graduates went to on to decades of organizing and serving in (mostly CIO) unions, or as labor journalists or labor educators.

Altenbaugh, Richard. Education for Struggle: the American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Jonathan D. Bloom, Jonathan D. “Brookwood Labor College and the Progressive Labor Network of the Interwar United States, 1921-1937” Ph.D., New York University, 1992.

Bloom, Jonathan D. “Brookwood Labor College,” in Steven H. London et al., eds., The Re-Education of the American Working Class. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.

DeCaux, Len. Labor Radical. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.