Rand School of Social Science

RAND SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. Founded in 1906, the Rand School of Social Science was the first major workers’ school, and it survived the longest. (Ruskin College at Trenton, Missouri, had been founded in 1900 but failed shortly thereafter.) Initially begun as a workers’ school under the leadership of the Socialist Party, the Rand School, although it continued to remain committed to a socialist philosophy of education, evolved into an adult-education institution whose offerings were similar to a number of other programs in the city. Its most distinguished administrator, Algernon Lee (1873–1954), a moderate Socialist and member of the New York City Board of Aldermen from 1918 to 1922, headed the school for more than forty years after 1909.

In 1901, a group of socialists including Morris Hillquit, Charles Beard, William Ghent, and George Herron had formed the American Socialist Society (ASS) for the express purpose of founding an institution of workers’ education. Herron’s mother-in-law, Carrie Sherfey Rand, a wealthy widow from Des Moines, Iowa, was a former abolitionist with radical views. Her bequest of the income from $200,000, amounting to $5,000 to $6,000 annually, made it possible to establish the Rand School.

The school opened in the fall of 1906 with ninety students on East Nineteenth Street in Manhattan. Over the next fifty years the school offered courses to working men and women on a variety of cultural and current topics and socialist theory. Teachers included the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement, social pragmatists from the working world and the trade union movement, and such distinguished luminaries as Scott Nearing, Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, Stephen Vincent Benét, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey.

By 1917 the school had outgrown its quarters and purchased a six-story building off Union Square at 7 East Fifteenth Street vacated by the Young Women’s Christian Association. The building had an auditorium and spacious classrooms, and its extra space was rented to sympathetic organizations. The “People’s House,” modeled after a center in Brussels, Belgium, was to become the cultural and educational center for the Socialist movement in New York. The school’s educational offerings and programs included a six month full-time residential program, a two-year part-time program for employed workers, a summer session for out-of-towners, a correspondence course, and a labor research department, as well as a library, bookstore, gymnasium, and cafeteria. Courses in the period from 1906 to 1922 pertained to socialist theory, economics, American history, literature, and other traditional subjects.

The antiradical hysteria after World War I subjected the school to a series of police interference and mob attacks. In 1919 the New York State Legislature voted Senator Clayton Lusk (Lusk Committee) $50,000 to investigate “subversive activities.” Earlier attacks had included an indictment under the Espionage Act of the ASS and Scott Nearing for his antiwar pamphlet The Great Madness, published by the Rand School. The Lusk Committee conducted a raid on the offices, confiscated property, and attempted to close the school by court-ordered injunction. Through a series of court cases the school was able to successfully counter the attacks. Meanwhile the 1919 split in the Socialist Party led to the disappearance of staff and lecturers sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, and the control of the school was left firmly in the hands of the right-wing Socialists. Government harassment disappeared when Al Smith came into gubernatorial office in 1922, and the school was never again subjected to outside interference.

The Rand School entered into a period of expanded course offerings and special educational programs, and student enrollment increased. The curriculum shifted from socialist instruction to a wide range of courses in the areas of trade union policies, education, home economics, music, art, Russian studies, peace education, propaganda and public opinion, psychology, public speaking, and social work. Although it increasingly catered to a large group whose interest was predominantly in liberal education, the administration of the school was committed to offering socialist theory.

Once the Rand trust funds were exhausted the school survived financially through various means, partly supported by the bookstore, Rand School Press, and donations from the Garland Fund and private sources. But the cost of operations perennially exceeded the school’s assets. Bertha Howell Mailly, executive secretary from 1912 until her retirement in 1941, is credited with saving the school on many occasions by launching countless fund-raising campaigns, including bazaars, dances, and concerts. In 1919 Mailly visited Unity House, a resort owned by a local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in Bushkill, Pennsylvania. Learning of an adjacent tract of land for sale, she conceived the idea of extending the Rand School to a workers’ summer school and camp. Camp Tamiment, named after an old Indian name for the area, grew to become commercially successful and from 1936 to 1956 provided backing to keep the school afloat. A large part of the camp’s success was due to the fact that it had tax-exempt status based on its educational and cultural programs.

By the 1950s the government could no longer overlook what had become one of the largest, most modern, and most profitable resorts in the area. The camp decided that acquiring the title to the school’s library would ensure a continued tax exemption. A five-year struggle ensued, during which time the camp systematically withdrew financial support from the school. In 1956 the People’s Educational Camp Society (PECS) acquired title and full ownership of the Rand School and the Meyer London Memorial Library and Reading Room. It dissolved the school and integrated its educational and cultural activities into the Tamiment Institute. After several appeals, in February 1963 the PECS lost its tax case with the Internal Revenue Service. Camp Tamiment was sold, and the library, all that remained of the old Rand School, now renamed the Tamiment Institute Library, was given to New York University Libraries.

During the height of its success between 1910 and 1920, the Rand School enrolled approximately five thousand students annually. In 1946 thirteen thousand students attended classes and lectures, but shortly thereafter the school suffered a sharp decrease in both enrollment and course offerings.

What remains of the Rand School of significance for the Left is the library. Its extensive collections of socialist and trade union literature, pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, manuscripts, iconography, and ephemera are open to all. Recent special projects include the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, which collects and inventories labor union records, and the Oral History of the American Left.

Cornell, Frederic. “A History of the Rand School of Social Science, 1906 to 1956.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976.

Schwartz, Rachel Cutler. “The Rand School of Social Science, 1906–1924: A Study of Worker Education in the Socialist Era.” Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1984.

Swanson, Dorothy. “The Tamiment Institute/Ben Josephson Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive at New York University.” Library Quarterly (April 1989).

Wirth, Thomas, A Beautiful Public Life: George D. Herron, American Socialism, and Radical Political Culture at the Rand School of Social Science, 1890-1956. PhD dissertation. Binghamton University, 2014.

Guide to the Rand School of Social Science. Tamiment Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_007/bioghist.html