Jefferson School of Social Science

JEFFERSON SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. The U.S. Communist Party founded the Jefferson School of Social Science in 1943 as an expression of its view that Marxism was a legitimate doctrine that was being neglected by conventional schools. An unofficial establishment, this alternative school was intended primarily for outreach rather than (as in the case of its predecessor, the Workers School) to train Party cadres or to recruit members. At its Lower Manhattan site, the “Jeff School” offered hundreds of courses each term, boasted of a thirty-thousand volume library, and put on concerts and theatrical presentations that attracted large audiences. The student body numbered twenty-five hundred at first and went up to five thousand a term by the peak years, 1947–1948. Howard Selsam (1903-1970), the school’s director, was a former Brooklyn College philosophy professor. The rest of the administrative and teaching staff (who were offered salaries) and an unpaid board of trustees included several heavily credentialed leftist academics and a number of teachers dismissed from New York’s municipal colleges in the Rapp-Coudert purges of 1940–1941.

The learning process at the Jefferson School was not entirely political in nature. The introductory twelve-week course on Marxism, “The Science of Society” (fee: $7), covered the basic principles of Marxism, historical materialism, the theory of the state, surplus value, class struggle, and strategy and tactics in the transition to socialism. Advanced courses—hundreds each term—explored such issues as racism, imperialism, the U.S. political system, Jewish history, and trade union tactics. But artists and craftspersons also offered studio art and dance programs for children and adults. Some of the courses seem to have had little direct relation to the kind of political action normally fostered by a Communist Party-run school. For example, in the winter term, 1948, Dashiell Hammett taught “Mystery Story Writing.” Students could also take such courses as “How to Decorate Your Home … [a] practical course in making a home within a limited budget.” There was even a “Beauty and Fashion Clinic: Making the Most of Your Appearance” intended to show “the busy working woman how she can make herself more attractive with the least expenditure of time and money” and thus be more effective in trade union organizing. These courses, along with popular forums, special workshops, and single-admission ($.50) lectures, attracted students from the large pool of politically aware office and industrial workers in the city (men and women, black and white), conventionally educated middle-class people, and the inevitable sprinkling of agents planted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The problems of effective teaching in the Jefferson School’s lively, heterogeneous classes of mostly adult students, many with little previous academic experience, soon prompted the faculty to institute teacher-training courses and to prepare learning aids for students. The staff produced a simple yet sophisticated nickel pamphlet, How to Study, that sought to demonstrate that Marxism can “be mastered by the average person.” The emphasis was on building confidence and putting ability to learn in a political context, countering alleged capitalist propaganda about workers’ supposed “limited intellectual abilities.”

During the McCarthy era the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), the federal apparatus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, directed the Jefferson School to register as a “Communist-controlled organization.” At first the Jefferson School refused to do so and attempted a defense against the SACB (Jefferson School v. SACB, 331 F.2d 76 [1954]). In the end, the Jefferson School succumbed to massive government pressure and permanently closed its doors in 1956.

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

Peter Filardo, "Guide to the Jefferson School of Social Science (New York, NY) Records and Indexes," Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, New York, NY.

Gettleman, Marvin E. "No Varsity Teams": New York's Jefferson School of Social Science, 1943–1956. Science & Society, Vol. 66, No.3 (Fall, 2002), pp.336-359.
Howard Selsam papers, 1935-1972