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 pedagogy and curriculum changed to reflect this more expansive vision. Starting in 1925–26, the college began to organize ‘‘labor sports,’’ volleyball, baseball, hiking, tennis, and horseshoe pitching, to foster physical health and working-class solidarity.127 It also broadened its curriculum to include elective courses in subjects like social psychology, current events, labor journalism, literature, and dramatics. The Brookwood Review announced these changes in December 1925 with a modernized format and a lively lead article: ‘‘Can that most dramatic movement in the world, the Labor Movement, be dramatized? And dramatized . . . by the workers themselves? Can the workers, in dramatizing the movement for the world, bring home to their own consciousness the scope and possibilities of the movement? Can they, in effect, create a form of drama characteristic of the new proletarian spirit in production?’’128
As this quote suggests, labor theater proved the most popular with students and faculty. The new drama teacher, Jasper Deeter of the Provinceton Playhouse, oversaw student writing and production. Like the proletarian cultural production of the 1930s, these plays mixed proletarian realism and modernism, while also drawing upon the formulas of mass culture. While often rather simplistic, they reflected students’ actual experiences; one of the authors of the play Shades of Passaic had been beaten by the police for participating in an ACW-led strike.129
Brookwood faculty also wrote and produced plays. Tom Tippett, a former miner who was hired to teach economics in 1927 and later became the school’s extension director, published Mill Shadows, a dramatization of how one company town was transformed into a union community.130 Helen Norton, the school’s journalism instructor, wrote a number of plays, one of which was a satire of a faculty meeting that reveals much about the culture and politics of Brookwood during this dynamic period. In the play, Muste introduces the meeting agenda, stating that they need to plan Brookwood’s economy. Cara Cook, the school’s librarian and tutor, responds, ‘‘I thought what we wanted was a revolution, not a planned economy.’’ Yet, to meet costs, they must figure out how to reduce the number of students. One faculty member suggests eliminating students who ‘‘get second helpings in the dining room.’’ After realizing that this would eliminate nearly every student, another suggests cutting ‘‘out one student from each political wing represented at the school.’’ But that solution is also seen as impractical since it would mean that ‘‘practically everybody would leave, and the few left would have far too much harmony in the class room.’’ At one point, David Saposs offers to economize by not teaching his classes. Eventually, they decide to host a ‘‘bazaar,’’ but then immediately start debating how to raise money, the gradual approach or the big campaign, metaphorically discussing the best means of organizing workers. Throughout, the meeting is interrupted by phone calls from various creditors and labor contacts, as well as by Connie Muste, who asks her father for a pencil for her history test the next morning.
The play speaks to ‘‘the spirit of fellowship’’ and ‘‘dear love of comrade’’ that Brookwood sought to inculcate, while its humor serves to release tensions over the perennial challenge of fund-raising, quality of the food, heating problems, and gender; in one scene, when Muste is told that the furnace in the women’s dormitory might blow up and destroy the labor posters the students had made, he responds, ‘‘Well, it would get rid of the women students, and I’d give a poster a day to get that problem off my hands.’’131
Brookwood faculty and students performed these plays, along with labor songs, poems, and lectures on a variety of topics in traveling ‘‘labor chautauquas’’ that raised money for the school and for various strike funds, while also educating workers in the history and culture of unionism.132 Yet this cultural turn brought criticism from some quarters that suggested that it would divert working-class militants from the urgent task of industrial organization.133 As a result, culture remained secondary to the college’s main purpose of training trade unionists to more effectively serve the labor movement. The college’s refusal to hire V. F. Calverton, the editor of the modernist literary magazine Modern Quarterly, as a full-time instructor of literature reveals the dominant place practical courses on trade unionism and the social sciences held in Brookwood’s curriculum. As Muste explained of the college’s decision to only employ him on a part-time basis, ‘‘we are specializing in getting men and women whose interests are not primarily cultural or scholarly but who are practical people who . . . are going to do the practical work of the trade union movement.’’ Perhaps when Brookwood became a full-scale ‘‘labor university,’’ it would be able to hire Calverton on a full-time basis.134
Muste’s dreams for Brookwood and the labor movement thus remained expansive, despite his moderate posture and practical orientation during this period. Between the poles of revolutionary socialist and loyal trade unionist was a pragmatist who recognized the importance of being flexible and adaptable to changing conditions. In the early 1920s, those conditions were corporate intransigence, a hostile state, a conservative labor movement, and a decimated left, all of which made education and conciliation with the AFL seem imperative. Pragmatism also gave Muste a language for reconciling his individualism with his allegiance to the working class; with its emphasis on cooperation and action as the path to freedom, pragmatism helped to temper his sense of historical destiny as a prophet of nonviolence and human brotherhood. Yet those ideals remained deeply important to him. As economic and political conditions changed, and as the labor movement and the far left remained resistant to his efforts at reconciliation, even going so far as to publicly attack and vilify him, he would revise his ideas about how to strengthen the labor movement and build a socialist America.
CHAPTER 4
Muste, Workers’ Education, and Labor’s Culture