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Student Activism in the 1930s
Lewis M. Cohen University of Louisville
The Student Outlook
About the middle of June twenty-two young men and young women met in the office of the Student League for Industrial Democracy in New York City. Five of them came from Ohio. Two were there from California, two from New York, and two from Kentucky. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wyoming, Oregon, South Dakota, Arkansas, Washington, and Connecticut were represented. One of the young men was a member of the legislature of the state of Washington There were three editors of college newspapers. These twenty young men and women were the student body of the second annual summer training school of the Student L.l.D. Doubtless we were a fairly representative cross-section of the radical student movement today. We hailed from every section of the country. Some of us had practically no experience in the radical movement. Others had been several years on the labor front. Some of us came from moderately wealthy conservative, middle-class homes. Others had been proletarians long before they became students. We were a heterogeneous group, and yet, linked as we were by a common purpose, strangely homogeneous. Chosen either because we had already accomplished something in the student movement or because we were in a position to accomplish something with the proper training, each one of us came with expectation of gaining a wealth of theoretical knowledge and actual experience.
Our six-weeks program was opened by the annual summer conference of the League for Industrial Democracy near Bound Brook, New Jersey. There we heard Sidney Hook, Norman Thomas, Harry W. Laidler, Abram Harris, Raymond Gram Swing, David Berenberg, Colston Warne, and others analyze the position of the middle class under capitalism. We also participated in the round table discussion of various groups of white collar workers led by recognized authorities in each field. The conference lasted three days. When we returned to New York, our work was separated into two main divisions—theoretical study and discussion, and active field work with unions and other working class organizations. Every morning we met with one of the prominent radical and labor leaders, while others came to speak at lunch or dinner. Joel Seidman, acting director of Brookwood Labor College, gave an excellent series of lectures on the American trade-union movement. Dr. Harry Laidler presented a Marxian critique of capitalist economics and politics. Arthur Garfield Hays and Roger Baldwin discussed civil liberties in an extremely interesting fashion. Race relations were treated at length by George Streator, organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Dr. E. Franklin Frazier, Chairman of the Harlem Investigation, and others. Reinhold Niebuhr gave an account of the Second International, while Bertram Wolfe lectured on the Third. Norman Thomas discussed the possibilities of socialism in America. Interesting lectures on the cooperative movement, both here and abroad, were presented by Sidney Hertzberg, former Scandinavian correspondent for the New York Times, and Wallace Campbell, a member of last year's summer school now connected with the Cooperative League. Some of our other speakers included Herbert Mahler of the I.W.W., Angelo Herndon, Stuart Chase, B. Charney Vladeck, George Soule of the New Republic, Dr. Jesse Holmes, professor of philosophy at Swarthmore, Richard Hippelhauser, Associated Press writer, Herbert Solow of the Non-partisan Labor Defense, Powers Hapgood, Lou Hay, the New York high school teacher who is largely responsible for the high school chapters of the L.I.D. there, Dr. John Haynes Holmes, Varian Fry, editor of The Living Age, and Paul Peters. Julius Hochman, Chas. Zimmerman, Joseph Schlossberg, Rose Schneiderman, Murray Baron and David Lasser were a few of the trade union and unemployed leaders who spoke before the summer school. Hearing all these radical and labor leaders meant much more to the students of the summer school than meeting personalities and hearing their views on various questions. Many of us came to New York with somewhat nebulous and hazy ideas concerning the radical movement. The lectures and discussions, of an infinitely varied and yet closely inter-related character, crystallyzed the problems and their solutions into more definite patterns. They imparted a direction to our field work. They helped to fill in the gaps in what might be referred to as our "leftist philosophy." The last of the six weeks was especially important. Conducted by Mary Hillyer, Monroe Sweetland, Joseph P. Lash and Anna Caples, it was devoted entirely to the vital campus problems that the radical student movement must face. Field work was carried on with three different working class groups, the students being assigned on a basis of past experience in the labor union field. Ten of us worked in locals of the Workers Unemployed Union, under the guidance of David Lasser, the president. We joined the locals as rank and file members, spoke at street meetings, distributed leaflets, worked as grievance committee members, participated in demonstrations before home relief bureaus and one outside Gen. Hugh Johnson's office, campaigned for new members, and in short entered into almost every phase of the locals' work.
Other students aided in the organization work of the militant Radio Workers Union, laying the groundwork for the unionization of workers in several shops by distributing leaflets to the men and engaging them in conversation. More than once in the course of their work they were chased away by angry bosses and foremen. Two of the students in the summer school were appointed organizers for the Suitcase, Bag, and Portfolio Makers Union, under the supervision of Murray Baron. After about five weeks of intensive work, they saw a strike called by the union just before the summer school closed, and allied themselves actively with the strikers in the few days before they had to leave for home. A most valuable contribution of the first L.l.D. summer school to the unemployed movement was repeated this year. We conducted an extensive survey of flats in representative tenement districts on the lower east side, in the Bronx, in Harlem, in Brooklyn, and other sections, in order to determine just how (or whether) the workers on home relief were managing to keep alive on their allotments. The statistics were turned over to the Workers Unemployed Union to be used as a basis for increased relief demands. Aside from the material attainments of the survey, we gained much experience in conducting survey work and in dealing with the unemployed, as well as an intimate insight into the condition of those capitalism can utilize no longer. Many of us carried away plans to continue the unemployed work as L.I.D. projects in our home towns. The field work as a whole was of immense value, especially to those of us whose experience in the labor movement had been small. Here we had, and used, the opportunity to ally ourselves directly with the working class, with organized labor, to take their problems as our problems (as indeed they are) and to deal with these problems directly. The field work was a veritable training ground in street meetings, picketing, demonstrations, strikes, organizational work, and all those other methods which labor must employ in its fight against the injustice of capitalism. Many of New York's summer demonstrations in addition to those of the unemployed found us taking an active part. When Hunter College held its commencement exercises, L.I.D. students were on the picket line protesting expulsion of several Hunter students now fortunately reinstated, for anti-war activity. When Clifford Odets, New York's brilliant young playwright, and his companions returned to New York after being refused admission to Cuba, we turned out en masse as part of the welcoming delegation. When strikers at the Brooklyn biscuit manufacturing plant issued a call for street speakers in an effort to raise some funds, the summer school was there with speakers and collectors. Some of us had our first encounter with the arm of capitalist law during the summer, when approximately fifty-two picketers, representing the National Student League summer school, the League of Women Shoppers, and the L.I.D. summer school were arrested at the offices of the American Mercury magazine on Fifth Avenue, in response to a request by the Office Workers Union. After a series of rather amusing incidents, including the "misplacement" of the key to one of the patrol wagons by an unapprehended student, we were all taken into custody. We were held for four hours. We utilized those hours in efforts to organize some fifteen peddlers in the "bull-pen" with us, and to fill a petition to free Angelo Herndon. Paroled in the custody of our lawyer by the night court magistrate, we moved in a body to Norman Thomas' house for a pre-arranged joint L.I.D.—N.S.L. party. The next morning we were back at court with two Socialist Party lawyers, an L.I.D. Attorney, and Arthur Garfield Hays. Thanks to their able defense, the case was dismissed. Publicity in all New York papers from Hearst's Journal to the Daily Worker made the picket line such a gratifying success that it was repeated the following week—at the request of the Union but minus most of the success. A Tammany magistrate who professed a bleeding heart for the three L.I.D. students and the one N.S.L. member arrested imposed a fine of five dollars or 3 days apiece, after admirably concocted perjury by the arresting officers. It took a Saturday night street meeting in Greenwich Village to raise the money for the fines. It was about this time of the summer that two men from the summer school paraded through Manhattan's garment center clothed impressively in barrels and white collars. They were assisted by signs which other summer students carried in reminding office-workers that they had nothing left but their white collars, and that the Bookkeepers, Stenographers, and Accountants Union was holding a street meeting at noon. As a result of this unique announcement, 2,000 office workers attended the meeting. Not all of our time in New York was occupied by lectures, field work, and demonstrations, however. Two dances and several parties received their share of spare hours. Clifford Odets' successful plays, "Awake and Sing," "Waiting for Lefty," and "Till the Day I Die" were on Broadway during the summer, as well as the Theatre of Action's production, "The Young Go First." There was a picnic as well as two swimming parties. We could enjoy concerts at the Lewisohn Stadium for a quarter if we got there early enough, and free concerts in Central Park. In spite of the fact that the collective finances of the summer school were persistently at low ebb, we managed to "do" New York. On one delightful occasion we were the all-day guests of Mrs. Isabelle Friedman at Far Rockaway, and another eventful day was at the home of Norman and Mrs. Thomas at Cold Spring Harbor. One of the most important factors in the undoubted success of this year's summer school, was the spirit of congeniality and good nature which reigned through-out (although sometimes just a little difficult to perceive in the white-heat of an argument on, say, the Franco-Soviet pact). Discipline, recreation and other managerial detail was cared for by self-government of student committees. The bond of friendship among the students and the members of the staff has been continued since the close of the school by a round-robin letter to which each of us makes an addition as it comes to him. It should be around my part of the country pretty soon now. And that is the story, briefly told, of what we twenty-two L.I.D.ers did for six weeks in New York City: our work, if anything so intensely interesting can be called work, and our play. I believe that this six-weeks course comprised the most valuable six-weeks 1 have ever spent. We studied theory under several of the leading theoreticians of the radical movement. It was a rare experience to have met the most brilliant personalities in the fight for a new social order. We participated as rank and file members of unions, learning what organizational work really entails. We learned how to speak at open air meetings, and what techniques to employ (or to avoid) in demonstrations. We dealt carefully with the immediate problems that we shall have to face on the campus. In brief, we gained something of experience from almost every phase of the radical and labor front. And we left New York City in August with a host of new ideas and new enthusiasm for the fight ahead. Home | Historical Essay | Documents | Credits | ||||||
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