NEW DEAL TEACHER-TRAINING
CENTERS, 1934-1935
Joyce L. Kornbluh
In summers 1934 and 1935, forty residential, six-week
teacher-training centers, initiated and administered by Hilda W. Smith under
the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) Emergency Education Program,
aimed to develop workers' education practitioners for government-sponsored
relief classes. The centers, held on college campuses in 27 states, were the
first federally-funded teacher-training programs in the
Smith and her able assistant Ernestine Friedmann, a
former staff member at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers (BMSSWW),
hoped to disseminate informal, nondidactic methods pioneered at the residential
workers' schools in the 1920s. She and her small national staff prepared vast
amounts of materials relating classroom democracy to social and political
democracy. These advocated an active and informed citizenry educated through a
process of critical thinking about social issues as a way of linking group-centered
classroom learning to more intelligent community involvement. At the beginning
of the New Deal, the liberal rhetoric of these goals fit the Roosevelt
Administration's agenda, although as time went on over the next several years,
Smith's pedagogical intentions fit less well with the New Deal's political
thrust and pragmatic focus on relief.(2)
The teacher-training program, as
well as the rest of the New Deal workers' education activities, were
caught in the ideological and organizational cross fire between the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) and the nascent Committee, then Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIA). It also was in the middle of the battle between
the public school establishment and the Roosevelt Administration. Across the
country, the centers were also attacked as a federally-funded program that was partisan to labor and infiltrated by leftist ideologues. The
teacher-training centers of 1934 and 1935, as a
result, serve as a microcosm of several issues facing workers' and labor
education at that time, and now: tensions about goals, content, staffing,
sponsorship, political support.(3)
The teacher-training centers of 1934 and 1935,
initiated to develop workers' education instructors, were the precursor of a
national Works Progress Administration (WP A) program of federally-funded
teacher training for instructors of all relief classes in 1936 and 1937 and
fostered the continued dissemination of progressive and adult education
philosophy and techniques to new populations. They were also the impetus for
degree-granting adult education graduate programs started in the 19305 at many
universities around the
THE CONCEPT OF TEACHER
TRAINING IN WORKERS' EDUCATION
The concept of teacher training for workers' classes
had been proposed and discussed throughout the 1920s at meetings of the
Workers' Education Bureau (WEB); Local 189 (the local union of workers'
educators founded at
Smith promoted teacher training from the beginning of
her troubled tenure as director of the New Deal's Workers' Service Program. In
a memo sent to government administrators in August 1933, prior to being hired
by Harry Hopkins and starting her job in the fall of that year, she recommended
"a nationwide program to train unemployed teachers in a new method of
experimental education. . . to conduct a department of
educational method and research in teaching problems (and) to prepare and
distribute suitable pamphlet materials."(6) In multiple memos and
meetings, Smith lobbied Hopkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, Aubrey Williams, and others
at the national level about the need to develop a federally-financed
teacher-training program within the context of the New Deal Emergency Education
Program to disseminate the philosophy and methods of progressive education and
experiential group work learning that had developed at the residential programs
for workers in the 1920s. She recommended holding such a project at the Bryn
Mawr campus in connection with the annual summer schools for women workers. She
also aimed through such a program to help finance the staff and floundering
programs of the ALES that were cash poor in the early 1930s.(7)
The need for persons trained to lead workers' courses
in the New Deal Emergency Education Program became acute during Smith's first
winter on the job. Requests accelerated for instructors to teach FERA-sponsored
classes for workers in union halls, settlement houses, community centers, and
public schools. Relief instructors had educational backgrounds ranging from
high school dropouts to those with PhDs. New Deal regulations only required
that instructors be unemployed, eligible for relief, and have some experience
(vaguely defined) in the field to be taught. Very few instructors tapped for
workers' classes were familiar with diverse work place conditions, issues
facing unions, and the philosophy of the labor movement. Fewer had taught
adults with little formal schooling.(8)
Smith's goals for the teacher-training centers were
clearly pedagogical rather than rehabilitative. Within the relief focus of the
New Deal, they were ambiguous and unrealistic. However, the outline of this
program tapped
a sympathetic understanding of the labor movement;
experience in unions or workplace groups; a knowledge of economics; a knowledge
of their subject; communication skills; willingness to learn from their
students; ability to relate their teaching to their own and their students'
experiences; intellectual integrity; a broad, nonprejudiced cultural
experience; a belief in adult students' ability to learn; an interest in the
adult students as individuals; a warm, attractive, sympathetic personality; and
q sense of humor.(10)
She spelled out this list, as stated above, in written
memoranda, leading some critics to comment on her desire for "integrated
paragons. "(11)
This was indeed a tall order, given the
administrative difficulties and short time available to organize the
teacher-training centers in both summers of 1934 and 1935; in 1934, two weeks'
time was allotted because of late federal appropriations and program
confirmation. In addition, there were problems of recruitment to the centers; a
lack of understanding by many trainees of the nature and purpose of the
program; a shortage of faculty and administrators who, on short notice, could
staff the centers, support these goals, and fulfill the ambiguities of the
training program itself.
THE TEACHER TRAINEES
Teacher trainees were recruited hastily by
administrators in relief offices who were unclear about the aims of the
program. The trainees had to pass a means test that certified they were
eligible for relief. In some states, they had to pass IQ and reading tests, as
well. Trainees arrived at the centers with little knowledge of workers' or
adult education, or awareness of the content of the program. Some came because
they were assured of six weeks' pay of $18.00 a week, and room and board for the
summer. Some arrived in need of medical care; many were dispirited from months
of being jobless. Some brought families, contrary to advance instructions,
hoping to provide three meals a day for spouses and children. Many had been
told by relief administrators that the summers' training would lead to higher
paying jobs as emergency education administrators in New Deal programs.(12)
Only half the trainees in 1934 and 1935 had any
college education. Less than half had industrial experience and social science
knowledge that Smith deemed important. After visiting the teacher-training
center in southeast
Smith's first policy memo to center administrators and staff
emphasized her lofty goals that the main objective of the program was to have
trainees discover and practice methods of teaching social sciences to workers.
She stipulated that the centers be run as nondidactic learning experiences
focused on the needs and interests of participants, involving them in
developing curricula, participating in center governance, incorporating adult
education and group work methods in center classes, using trainees as
discussion leaders, and developing contacts with local unions and their
workers.
To implement these aims, she advocated classes on government, labor economics, and current events. She recommended field trips to factories, farms, community cooperatives, housing developments, and social service agencies. She suggested that participants observe workers' education classes at some of the residential schools for workers being held in 1934 around the country. She followed this memo by shipping to the centers vast quantities of reading materials and bibliographies that had been developed by the ALES and WEB as part of the grants they received in 1933 from the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations.(14)
THE FACULTY
Many of these recommendations were unrealistic given
the limitations of the trainees as well as the hastily recruited training
centers' faculty and staff. Most of the faculty were
either academics (10%), members of various federal and state governmental
industrial relations boards, researchers, or industrial workers. Few understood
the trainees' needs, or the needs of their potential worker-students.
Many of the faculty,
understandably, were ill-prepared. Many found it difficult to lead
discussions rather than lecture, and to involve trainees in center governance.
However, of approximately 200 faculty and staff at the 1934 and 1935 centers,
about a third came from Smith's ALES and YWCA networks and had taught in
workers' schools or classes. They included Lillian Herstein of the Chicago
Teachers Union; Colston Warne, an economist from Amherst College; economist Amy
Hewes from Holyoke College; drama teacher Susan Shepard, who had taught at the
Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers; Nelson Cruikshank, a minister who
worked closely with the New England labor movement; Arthur Calhoun, who had
taught at Brookwood Labor College; and Mercer Evans, a specialist on southern
labor from' Emory College in Georgia.(15)
THE PROGRAM
Daily classes were held six days a week. In some of
the schools, group projects, independent study, group discussions, labor drama,
field trips, and guest speakers were part of the programs.
Some centers had trainees compile bibliographies and
manuals for workers' classes; conduct simple surveys of work and living conditions
in nearby areas; document the history of strikes in that state; chart the
growth of membership in specific unions. Some centers used labor drama where
trainees wrote and performed skits about sharecroppers, household workers,
prostitutes, and industrial working conditions, as well as skits about their
own experiences in relief offices and employment bureaus. Evening programs
included folk dancing, group singing, mock forums on current issues, guest speakers on topics such as the
ATTACKS ON THE PROGRAM
Smith's teacher-training centers of 1934 and 1935
came under attack from conservative political groups, the public school
establishment, and the American Federation of Labor. Newspaper headlines
challenged their content, teaching methods, materials, and personnel. Critics
also flagged the appropriateness of their goals and the use of federal
resources to finance the project, deemed "partisan" in the eyes of
many.
Throughout the country, headlines from 1934 on
proclaimed "Reds Rule FERA Schools," "Red Theories Taught Free
by Uncle Sam," "WP A Hires Socialist for
Director." Dailies from the New York Times to small town papers
charged that class-conscious subjects were being taught. The articles claimed
that anti-capitalist materials were used, books by radicals were assigned, and
instructors had left-wing leanings.
An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer charged
that trainees in a FERA teacher-training center sang "The
International," discussed strikes, and satirized the capitalist system. A
full-page ad placed by the Republican Party in a western
The people of the village shuddered through six weeks
of communistic activity at one of 100 such schools operated throughout the Raw
Deal with taxpayers' funds. . . Men of Olivet wanted to take matters in their
own hands and drive the students out of the village. And to add insult to
injury, a lot of these crackpots spent the money the government gave them on
beer.(17)
A number of the WP A teacher-training centers were investigated
by national and state New Deal administrators as a result of these charges. In
all cases, they were cleared. Negative public opinion, however, persisted as
patriotic organizations such as the Liberty Leagues, American Legion, and
Daughters of the American Revolution continued their campaign with letters and
resolutions sent to congressmen and public officials calling for an immediate
end to workers' education training centers and classes. Hearings held by the
House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-1930s continued to stir up
additional opposition by focusing on Communist infiltration of industrial
unions and the "traitorous" actions of New Deal politicians who
supported or failed to suppress the accelerating industrial union movement and
the militant CIO.(18)
Hostility to the centers and to the Emergency
Education Program as a whole also came from public school officials at all
levels. The school establishment perceived the New Deal education programs,
including the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps
as a dual system of education and training that would erode professional
educational standards by using noncredentialed, inadequately educated
personnel. They felt by-passed by the Roosevelt Administration, angry at
political appointments, and shortchanged by the New Deal's failure to give
existing school institutions higher appropriations to shore up their deficits.
Public school administration leaders attacked what
they perceived as the increasing federalization of education and potential
intervention into local control of education. Protective of their professional
jurisdictions, they pressed for public educational agencies to have more
control over the hiring and training of part-time temporary teachers assigned
to relief classes.(19)
.The American Federation of Labor also sought control
over administration, staffing, and content of classes. Federation leaders
feared outside radical influences in workers' classes that would challenge the
craft organization of labor and weaken the loyalty of craft-union members to
their unions and to the capitalist economy. Suspicious of outside
intellectuals, frequently repressive of independent workers' education
endeavors such as
Thus, Smith's programs were caught in the crossfire
between AFL and CIO proponents. Attacks from AFL leaders undermined national
and local support for the teacher-training centers as well as for the New Deal
workers' education classes. The 1939 AFL convention resolution summed up the
Federation's charges about bureaucratic inefficiency and mismanagement, erosion
of educational standards, high costs, and ended: "At times there has been
a gesture at cooperation with the AFL, but not permanently. (Personnel) have
been appointed without consultation with state AFLs."(20)
There was indeed much reality behind these charges
about Smith's teacher-training centers and workers' education classes. The
Roosevelt Administration had deliberately by-passed the public school system in
setting up the Emergency Education Program. Many New Deal administrators held that
"if (public) education were to be called on to do the job, the New Deal
would be largely, if unintentionally, sabotaged." In answering attacks
from public school administrators and responding to 1936 charges from the
National Education Association,
The charges of radical staff in the
teacher-training centers and in the New Deal workers' classes also was
based on reality, although much exaggerated. Communists, Socialists,
Trotskyists, and other radical activists certainly sought jobs as' workers'
education staff and instructors. Autobiographies of radical leaders and novels
by left-oriented authors were indeed on the reading lists for the
teacher-training centers, along with books by progressive educators John Dewey,
Eduard Lindeman, George Counts, and historians Harold Rugg, and Mary and
Charles Beard. The mix of staff, readings and resources at the training centers
certainly reflected the social and political ferment of the 1930s. At the same
time, however, this mix gave ammunition to the political right that exaggerated
its impact in its overall political attacks on the New Deal. As a result,
Smith's program, including the teacher-training centers, was damned for its
political implications rather than praised for its pedagogical intent.
CONTINUATION OF NEW DEAL TRAINING ACTIVITIES
In retrospect, Smith and Ernestine Friedmann
evaluated the teacher training centers as "three-quarters relief and
one-quarter teacher training. "(22) However,
despite the administrative trials and tribulations and contradictory goals, the
centers had an enormous impact. Smith's persistent lobbying and advocacy made
New Deal administrators aware of the need to train instructors for all
emergency education programs. In summer 1935, a nationwide WP A
teacher-training program was authorized. Centers that trained teachers for
workers' classes were absorbed into this larger program that came directly
under the administration of Emergency Education Director Lewis Alderman. Smith
was no longer involved. There was no controversial material on workers, unions,
or work place conditions. Teacher-training centers were now run in cooperation
with state and local public school officials and some universities.
Held for six weeks on college and university
campuses, these centers continued to focus on teaching methods for adult
classes as well as on New Deal legislation and social policies. These centers
were a direct outgrowth of Smith and Friedmann's 1934 and 1935 project and
carried on their work of disseminating information about adult learning and the
need for new kinds of teaching techniques. Many materials on teaching methods
that had been developed by ALES and WEB were also used in these later
teacher-training sessions.(23)
Throughout the remainder of the 1930s, teacher
training for adult participants was conducted in a variety of forms under state
rather than federal sponsorship: one to five-week workshops, weekend, and
one-day conferences. It was probable that every New Deal instructor received
some form of in-service training. One source considered these teacher-training programs
"possibly. . . the most valuable contribution of
the Works Progress Administration. It accomplished the ultimate in
achievement--the conversion of a liability into an asset. It took over
thousands of teachers and professionally trained people who were literally on
the scrap heap of life and not only trained them to do a job well (but to
perform) a service to the community."(24)
Colleges and universities began to organize regular
summer school courses that emergency education instructors could attend for
credit, and many educational institutions organized degree programs and
graduate departments of adult education.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE 1934
AND 1935 TEACHER-TRAINING CENTERS
Sixty percent of the trainees from the 1934 and 1935
centers were subsequently hired as emergency education instructors in New Deal
classes, teaching workers and other adult students in union halls, settlement
houses, YWCAs, and public schools. Several were appointed state supervisors of
workers' education or city/county administrators in other New Deal emergency
education programs. Sam Berger, Frank Fernbach, Hal Gibbons, Chris Jorgensen,
Roy Reuther, Mike Rider, and Nat Weinberg went on from the teacher-training
centers to long careers on labor union staffs or with other related
organizations. In some areas, trainees formed support groups to spur interest
in workers' education and to organize classes in that locale.(25)
These accomplishments can be directly attributed to
Smith's project. Her vision and persistence linked the pedagogical
accomplishments of the 1920s' residential schools for workers to the Emergency
Education Program of the 1930s, and on into the post World War II period. She
flagged for New Deal administrators the need to conduct federally-funded
teacher training in a massive government-sponsored, national program. The links
between these programs and earlier progressive education developments made a
contribution to workers' education and to adult education that carried far
beyond the New Deal period.
For most of the trainees, their involvement in group
learning settings, however imperfect, offered them the first experience with
educational democracy and participant-centered learning. Long before the term
"group dynamics" became fashionable, these trainees were engaged in a
peer-oriented process that was unique for that time.
In areas where there had been time to develop
advisory committees, representatives of unions, community groups, and public
school institutions became familiar with workers' education concepts and
techniques, and laid the basis of working together on future workers' education
projects. Financial support for the ALES and the WEB, and use of their
materials, helped sustain these organizations during troubled financial times.
Universities and colleges became aware of their
possible roles in developing credit programs in adult education and in
noncredit workers' education extension classes. Trainees and staff were
sensitized to new content areas, teaching-learning methods, potential
coalitions, and political realities involved in developing workers' /labor
education in a less than sympathetic political environment. Many institutions,
programs, and lives were changed as a result.
"Whatever kind of teaching I do,"
one enthusiastic trainee wrote in evaluating the 1935 center that he attended,
"I will never be the same person. I feel as though I have been living in a
new world and I don't want to lose touch with it again."(26)
NOTES
1.
2. Hilda W. Smith, "Memorandum on Policies for
Organizing a Teacher Training Center," (Washington, D.C.: Office of the
Specialist in Workers' Education, 1934); Doak S. Campbell, Frederick H. Bair,
and Oswald L. Harvey, Educational Activities of the Works Progress
Administration, U.S. Advisory Committee on Education, Staff Study No. 14
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939).
3. Joyce L. Kornbluh, A
New Deal for Workers' Education: The Workers' Service Program, 1933-1942 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1987), 96-114; 117-23.
4. Ibid., 123-26.
5. Eduard Lindeman to Spencer Miller_ Jr., 29 October
1923, Correspondence-Spencer Miller, Jr. file, Workers' Education Bureau
Papers, Martin P. Catherwood Library, N.Y. State School of Industrial and Labor
Relations, Cornell University; Workers' Education News, February 1924,
1; and June 1924, 1.
6. Hilda W. Smith and Spencer Miller, Jr.,
"Memorandum Sent to the Commissioner of Education, the Secretary of Labor
and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration." In Smith,
"People Come First,” Appendix 1.
7. Ibid., 9-11; Hilda W. Smith to George Zook,
8.
9.
10. Smith, "People Come First," 47.
11. Quoted in Harry Zeitlin, "Federal Relations in
American Education, 1933-1943: A Study of New Deal Efforts and
Innovations" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1958), 288-325.
12.
13. Eleanor Coit, "Report of a Trip to FERA Teacher
Training Center, West Chester, Pa., October 15, 16, and 17, 1935,"
American Labor Education Service Collection, rec. grp. 5225, box 15, Archives
of the N.Y. State School of Industrial and Labor Relations; Florence Nelson,
"Report of Workers' Education Teacher Training Center, A. M. and N.
College, Pine Bluffs, Ark., 1935," p. 2, WPA Workers Service Program
Papers, rec. grp. 69, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NADC); Constance
Williams, "Report of the Workers' Education Teacher Training Center, Yale
University, New Haven, Conn., 1935," p. I, WPA Workers
Service Program Papers, rec. grp. 69.
14. Smith, "Memorandum on Policies for
Organizing a
15.
16. This information is derived from the 1934 and 1935
reports of the directors of workers' education teacher-training centers in
17. Kornbluh, A New
Deal for Workers' Education, 100-02; Hilda W. Smith Papers, rec. grp. A-76,
Attacks file, Schlesinger Library,
18. Ibid.
19. Kornbluh, A New Deal for Workers' Education,
118-20; Zeitlin, "Federal Relations in American Education," 288-325.
20. Kornbluh, A
New Deal for Workers' Education, 120-23.
21. Roscoe Pulliam, "The Influence
of the Federal Government in Education," School and Society,
22.
23. Kornbluh, A
New Deal for Workers' Education, 76-77; 124-25.
24. Campbell, Bair, and Harvey, Educational
Activities, 136-37.
25. Ibid., 154.
26. Smith, "People Come First," 50.
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