American Labor Education Service (ALES) interview of Eleanor Coit, Orlie Pell, and Jane Hilda Worthington Smith, undated, side 1

Interviewer (00:04):
Workers' education has seemed to go through a couple of stages in its development. Uh, the first phase that some people seem to notice is a phase in the early twenties and early thirties in which the character of the student body was not all trade unionists. And the curriculum at that early point seemed to be a curriculum that was a liberal arts curriculum based in the social sciences, giving a broad offering of educational, uh, opportunities to the students. With the rise of the CIO and a, uh, the period of the mid thirties to the late thirties. The curriculum of workers' education seems to change to the need, to meet the needs of the labor movement. Uh, the needs of being, uh, providing shop steward training, providing, uh, collective bargaining, uh, uh, procedures, et cetera. The student body seems to change from a student body made up totally of trade unionists. Uh, from your experience, is that a correct statement or what, what in fact do you see that, uh, moves along those lines? If anything?

Eleanor Coit (01:20):
Well, Ms. Smith and Ms. Pell, and I have agreed I'll start and that gives them the hardest part of doing the next part. Uh, certainly workers' education has changed constantly over the whole period of its life, and the curriculum is not a set curriculum. Some programs in workers' education would be one thing and other programs would be another thing in the early thirties. Um, you were speaking about a curriculum that centered on certain humanities, general thinking. Brookwood was in those days. And that wasn't what Brookwood concentrated on. Although what you have in mind is probably what some of the summer schools, uh, had in mind. Workers' education always changed, and continues to change, in terms of the needs of the Labor Movement, in terms of history, in terms of different groups, with which you're dealing in different parts of the country. And you say that it eventually became bread and butter. ALES never became bread and butter ever. It stayed in the social sciences, it worked on community problems, worked on international problems, worked on certainly specific trade union problems, but the character and curriculum always adjusted to the needs and the interests of the students and the developments in the Labor Movement and the needs of the Labor Movement and to the historical scene. Ms. Smith, please go on.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (02:49):
Well, I should say that's a very good summary. Uh, I was thinking of say, you take one worker's class, I'm speaking with the Bryn Mawr Summer School. And those classes were very different, but in any of those classes, if you sat through even for a couple of hours, you would find that the discussion was very closely related to what the students were going to find and what they wanted to do when they went home in their own communities, whether or not they were from YWs or settlements or from the unions. They had in mind, something that they could take back to those other workers. And I definitely remember a student who came into my office in the early days of the Bryn Mawr School. She was a garment worker from Baltimore--a laundry worker from Baltimore. She said, you know, I don't think I'm getting anything here that the laundry workers in my, in my community can use.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (03:43):
She said they will expect me to come back and put up the sun and fix the moon and arrange all the stars for them. She said, I don't think I'm getting anything that's going to help those laundry workers. So we got her faculty together with her and we went over her, her course, her curriculum. And we changed that her eight weeks in that school for something very specific that she could use with laundry workers in Baltimore. Now this often came down to individual adjustments, but you, you all know, I'm sure, that the instruction was not academic. It was, it was related to the people in the class. Uh, and when you spoke of arts and humanities, including the social sciences, that rather threw me off the track, because I didn't think of those as arts and humanities or whatever they were called. I thought of those as economics and English, elementary science, uh, all the things that were related to the situation of those students in their own communities.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (04:52):
And in general, they wanted, they wanted to understand something about, uh, their employer's problems, their union problems, their communities, and responsibilities in those communities, in general way, citizenship. And I often thought of our curriculum as in those four categories: the worker and the industry; the worker and his union, or her union; the worker as related to government, like the laws that affected that job; and the worker in the community in a general way, citizenship. All tied together with a great deal of English, which they all wanted a great deal of practice and public speaking and methods of publicity and visual education, things that they could use, which were basic. Now, I don't know that that answers your question at all, but in general, there seems to be what I would regard as, as a method in workers' education, which still holds good. And I might just add one, one comment that surprised me and gave me a [laughs] great deal to think about.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (06:02):
And this was in local 189, two or three years ago, where a group of university professors actually raised a question, which gave me a great feeling of shock. They said, should controversial subjects be discussed in workers' classes? Well, I thought we're back in the kindergarten stage, the early days of the Bryn Mawr School, where we actually had a long discussion, did we dare use the term social action? Because those were dirty words at that time. And here we've come around to it in a circle to where university professors are questioning [laughs] whether or not controversial subjects should be brought up. And I just thought, well, in about five minutes in a worker's class, they will find that they are in controversial subjects [laughter].

Orlie Pell (06:51):
And yet, uh, isn't it true, Jane, that the Labor Movement, the outside world did change, labor did become stronger in the thirties. And with that change in the world and in the strength of the Labor Movement, there had to be a difference in the emphasis in the curriculum. It did deal more, didn't it with labor oriented subjects than it had in the early days when such a small proportion of students were in unions or were active in unions?

Eleanor Coit (07:18):
Well, I think it's important to recognize that almost any subject is labor oriented in one way or another. Uh, the changing in program of the American Labor Education Service, uh, one of the most important things we worked on in the late fifties was labor in the community, problems of labor in the community, older workers, uh, all kinds of health problems that are labor oriented. And what you were working on always was, as Jane says, the thing that confronted workers and that they had to do something about, and they were, you were hoping that workers' education would mean they would understand the world they lived in better and understand how more effectively to meet the problems that they had. Now, as far as whether people were more and more trade unionists in classes, I suppose they were because there were more and more trade unionists. But again, the school's all different.

Eleanor Coit (08:14):
You say Bryn Mawr started with half and half. Brookwood started with all trade unionists. And certainly the white collar school, which started in '33, started almost all unorganized because they weren't, uh, organized. I remember Theresa Wilson who was teaching economics saying to me, do you suppose we'll ever get to the Labor Movement? Because there was so much in economic history that had to be understood to put it in its setting, uh, so that it would depend on the school, depend on the need, and for instance, one of the last things the white collar school did was to have joint conferences with social workers. Well, they happened to be organized social workers, but they were concerned

Eleanor Coit (08:56):
with problems that affected unorganized social workers, as well as social workers, so that the, you were trying to meet a situation. And, uh, what happened related to that situation and to that need.

Interviewer (09:16):
Reading some of the things you've written, uh, about the, uh, the affiliated schools, I remember what came through to me very clearly about the spirit of those schools was the desire to develop critical thinking among the students. And of course, uh, you confronted the problem of controversial subjects by you, uh, addressing it. But yet, uh, well we find in labor education here that this is the bread and butter of our classroom. Uh, nothing is alien to labor education, no matter how controversial, and this is what makes up a basic, uh, uh, part of it of. I know that in the early years of our program, and Dr. Levine has been doing some research recently into these early years here at Rutgers, there were some problems with, for example, management, uh, one company, uh, official, uh, looking with a jaundice eye at the singing of solidarity forever at the end of some of our, at the end of one of our programs. And I know that in the Bryn Mawr experience, you had some problems with the administration of the college, uh, around the controversial, extra curricular activities of the students. And I was wondering if you would tell us a little bit about that period in 1935 when the school was in jeopardy, the summer school was in jeopardy as a result of, uh, some of this controversy,

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (10:48):
The school was evicted by the college for two years. Well, this came about, we thought from a misunderstanding in the original, uh, agreement with the Trustees of Bryn Mawr College. And this is, you probably all know, is the idea of president M. Carey Thomas. She went to England in 1920, and she found that in England every university had a worker's school. So she came back with this rather startling idea of opening the buildings for women from the factories, uh, four and eight weeks course. Well, in 1935, there was a cannery strike nearby. And we had had an agreement with the Trustees that while individuals could do anything they please, take part in strikes, and we had some, some, uh, industrial workers who came to Bryn Mawr, right from jail. They'd been in jail for picketing. But that we would not as a school take part in demonstrations, we would not carry banners.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (11:46):
We would not March as a school. Well, in this cannery strike nearby, it was a few miles away, uh, two of the faculty, Mildred Fairchild and Colston Warne went over just to see it. They found that the conditions were very bad. Uh, apparently tear gas had been used. There were, there were women in the dormitories who were ill. And they persuaded the, uh, employer to call in a doctor and not to use this tear gas. Uh, no one from the student body went near that strike, but to our great surprise, we were in the headlines next day. And one of the Trustees, one of our friends had misinterpreted this agreement, and we were accused of having broken that agreement about strikes. Whereas it was not broken at all because as a school we hadn't been near the strike. We didn't even know there were demonstrations. Anyway, without much discussion the college announced that we could not come back the next year.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (12:55):
And we decided we were going to carry on somewhere in some way. So we, we borrowed the camp from the art workshop up in the Ramapo Mountains. And for two years, we conducted the summer school up there. And Mrs. Oti (?), Mrs., uh, Bryn Mawr alumni who had been on the school staff was the director up there for two years. And it was, it ran as a perfectly normal worker school. It wasn't as large, but it went on. Then, by that time, the alumni all over the country, the Bryn Mawr alumni were very much enraged that this school had been put out. Uh, they were supporting it. We had 50 committees all through the country that were working for it. Uh, the former students of course, were, were terribly upset that the school was not there on the Bryn Mawr campus the next year. So the Trustees asked for a conference with us, and I think I've never been at a funnier meeting.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (13:59):
We set up a committee, and we met with the committee of the Trustees. And another accusation that they had against us, not only this strike thing, but they also misinterpreted what had happened in the school when we installed what they call the unit plan, which broke down the hundred, a hundred students into units of 20, each with an English teacher and an economist, and then cutting across on science and other things. And it made it very much less confusing for the students to, to be in a unit where they, they were, they weren't so mixed up going from one, one place to another all the time. But another accusation the college had against us at that time, that the original idea was a broad cultural program, and here we'd become all economics, they said all economics. So at that meeting that day, uh, they, one of the Trustees said, "could we have a school here in art, literature, and whatever, like humanities?"

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (15:06):
And we all said, "Oh yes, we can get such a school." And then they said, "Well, if we had such a school, wouldn't they get a little interested in economics? If they came here?" I said, "well not if you didn't, if you didn't teach it, I think." And they said, uh, "could, could we have a school like that?" I said, "yes, you can probably find people interested in art, literature, and the humanities, and you can have a school." And then they said, "would I come back and direct it?" And I said, "no, thank you. Because I would prefer to direct a worker school." And then the, all these nice, Quaker trustees, chorused, "well, what we want is a worker school." And our committee said, "we want a real worker school." Our committee said "you had one and you put it out." So they begged us to come back, on our own trips. And we went back and had, I guess, 12 more years on the Bryn Mawr campus after that, before we moved it to Hudson Shore. I don't know if that answers your question.

Interviewer (16:25):
It certainly does. [inaudible]

Eleanor Coit (16:28):
... but perhaps that's not what the group is interested in.

Interviewer (16:30):
Please do.

Eleanor Coit (16:32):
Well, I just think that we're putting a great deal of attention, as we should, on certain pioneer efforts about workers' education, certainly didn't consist only of the resident schools. There was a great deal, as you know, even in the early days, as you know, the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor had interesting classes. And as you know, the Women's Trade Union League in Chicago was teaching, and there were many other needs that had to be met supplementing these resident schools, which in mind were among the most important and the affiliated schools, um, about 1940, Ms. Smith went to Washington--'34 didn't you, Ms. Smith?--

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (17:20):
--'33--

Eleanor Coit (17:21):
--between 33 and 34. But you continued, as the director of the affiliated schools through '34, I think, before, the latter part of part of it anyway.

Eleanor Coit (17:27):
[crosstalk] And then the affiliated schools continued for another six or seven years, but partly through cooperating with the WPA program, which Ms. Smith ran. Our functions, uh, became broader and broader and not a coordinating body as it had been originally for the summer schools. We could still service the summer schools, but we serviced trade unions, we serviced workers groups of all kinds, all types of unions, all types of, uh, the parts of the country, all, um, approaches, all attitudes. And, uh, it was interesting, the kinds of special interests, uh, that had to been met that were not just bread and butter. That's the point I want to point out, uh, for instance, the summer school, the res--the ALES, which it became known as, did, um, uh, act as a center for many workers' education people to get together. But that's not my, what I was talking about.

Eleanor Coit (18:29):
We began to work in the white collar field, which was a new field in which the trade unions were beginning to be interested. We worked on the exchange of workers between this country and other countries. We worked on the problems of intergroup relations and the contribution of all groups, minority groups of all kinds, as well as others on the democratic approach. We worked on farmer labor relations. We worked on international affairs. We worked on labor in the community. The trade union movement had moved into an area of much wider concerns than only collective bargaining, as you know, they moved into a not, uh, interest in the total community and their contribution to the community and into understanding and taking part in world affairs. And I think it's awfully important to think of a curriculum as being based on all kinds of needs, uh, and not just on certain needs. Would that put it, Orlie, as you would put it?

Orlie Pell (19:27):
Yes, I would think so.

Eleanor Coit (19:29):
But anyway, that seems to me important all the time, of course, the affiliated schools, the Bryn Mawr Summer School, and the ALES worked on method, which was a very, very important part of our work. And on materials for workers' classes, uh, on training of teachers, as well as leadership training of trade unionists. But I think if you're going to think in terms of workers' education, you have to think in very, very broad terms.

Interviewer (19:59):
Uh, if I may, if I may, I'd like to ask you about the methods that you use in conducting your classes at Bryn Mawr. Um, I read, uh, that, uh, you used psychological tests, uh, in which you hope to, uh, determine, uh, what the deficiencies or inadequacies of your students were at the time. And you've mentioned in one of your books that their reading levels were particularly low. But of more interest perhaps is, is the fact that you used some very interesting teaching techniques. Um, uh, you mentioned that, um, you use things like, uh, techniques like role-playing, mock legislatures, things which have been, techniques which have been popularized in the schools today. [inaudible]

Eleanor Coit (20:55):
I'd like Orlie to follow it up though, because she was a teacher in the white collar school. And again, you use the same techniques, but with very different type of mind, with a very different experience, with a very different attitude. You always began where the group were. You began it, as Jane said, in terms of their interests. If you were teaching economics, you didn't do a long historical study first. You began with the problem in their plans and they were probably acting it out. And there you call that role-playing, well, we did it long before you called it role-playing because that's the way you got people thinking. But your whole approach was to begin where they were and interpret the world in which they lived. And it was--the psychological tests at Bryn Mawr, I think Jane ought to speak to rather than I because she was the one who conceived them. But it was very interesting.

Eleanor Coit (21:46):
For instance, at the Wisconsin school, they found ways to divide up. I remember how I used to go to all the schools. I was the lucky one because I worked for the affiliated schools as educational director for three or four years. And I thought they divided them. They were talking about their groups. They named them for the lakes. [laughter] I decided those were psychological terms, and I was--[laughter]--it was an awful joke when I [laughter] decided they divided them intelligently, but their naming was just for the lakes. And I didn't have to be as bright as I thought [laughter]. But each school found a way, and they integrated, you see, the teachers sat in each other's classes. I was thinking the other night about a class at the Wisconsin school. I think it was being taught by Bill Haber, who was one of the economists. And they were just on the edge of their seats with the discussion they were having in the area of economics, and they came to the end of the class and they said, "Oh, what will we do? We have to go to study English." And Mike Giles (?) who was an English teacher said, "Go right ahead. We'll do mine later." Now you see you were working on the ability of the student to comprehend ideas and to make judgments intelligently and to understand, and you weren't in little pockets. Now, Orlie, why don't you illustrate it from the white collar school?

Orlie Pell (23:07):
Well, I'd be glad to. When you mentioned that the reading level of the people, some of the people at the Bryn Mawr School may have been low. The exact opposite was true in the white collar school. They were relatively well educated and what's more, they felt that they were educated. They'd been through school. And the problem with white collar workers was to get them to see that there was a lot more to education than just finishing high school and knowing that much academic material, and then no more. So that you have to begin getting them thinking of themselves as living in a world that was more complex than they had thought. And to get them to think about that, worry about things and to think about things, uh, that they had perhaps taken for granted, or hadn't worried about before. So you began with educated people and got them interested in their own economic problems, which some of them hadn't thought so much about.

Orlie Pell (23:55):
I remember Tom Tippett starting one of the classes--he was in econ--he was doing economics at the white collar school. And he said, "look, if you're job, each of you now, if your job ended today, how long could you live on your financial resources? How much do you have that you could live on? Or how many weeks or months or years could you live?" And, you know, that just brought them up. They hadn't thought of that. And some of them said, "Well, I don't think I could live more than a couple of weeks." And some of them said, "Well, I think I could for a couple of months." But they began to realize how awfully close they were to, to economic disaster. And yet they thought of themselves in jobs, white collar jobs that were secure and respectable and close to the boss. They were sitting pretty, and yet they were closer to the economic disaster than they thought.

Orlie Pell (24:40):
And he got them to think of that right away there. And then they began and said, "well, what can we do about this? How can we work for more economic security? How can we work to see that our jobs are not quite so much on the edge of disaster?" We also had a problem with them, I think, that many of them came. That was the days of isms and our people were beginning to divide up. There was capitalism, and there was communism, and there was one thing or another, and you have to take sides, and you have to be this and that. You have to have an "ism." And they couldn't understand that our approach was this democratic educational [inaudible] that you began and got people thinking. You were not telling them what to think, you were trying to get them to think, and help them in how to think, but not what to think.

Orlie Pell (25:25):
And I had an awful argument with one girl who had an "ism" in her background, and she couldn't believe that we were not there to put over some kind of propaganda, that we were really some kind of "ists" or some kind of "ism" we were trying to get across. And I remember how pleased I was when at the end of the couple of weeks she came and she said, "you know, I really believe you now. I think you were really interested in education and in helping us to think and not in getting an "ism" across." And that we really had convinced them by the way we behaved, the way we acted, the way we worked the school that we were on the level, that we were on the up and up, and that we were democratic in the real sense of trying to help them to develop their thinking and not to accept this or that theory. So there you had entirely different kinds of problems that white collar people worked with.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (26:15):
Am I just say worried about these psychological tests? I think we had them partly at Bryn Mawr because we had a good psychologist on the staff, Harriet Ahlers, who was interested in them, and she set them up and conducted them in the first week of the school. Well, there was quite a good deal of unrest and protest among the students. And I remember we tried to explain what they were and, and they cooperated with it. They were worried about

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (26:44):
them. They didn't know what was going on, what was happening, why they were being tested. And I remember I tried to explain once by saying that they really were experimental, and we just wanted to understand if this was a good thing to use. And I remember one student got up in the, in the school assembly and said, "I wish to make a remark. I am a student at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and I am perfectly willing to be an experiment." And she sat down [laughter]. And that sort of carried the day.

Eleanor Coit (27:14):
And let me add a story. Jane always is the best one at stories. Uh, remember the man who said he would teach and said that he was running out of economics. [laughter] I thought that was your best one. [laughter] But, uh, one of the girls that came late to the summer school, uh, hadn't taken the test. I don't know that I ever told you this or not. And she, um, I couldn't find her. She had to take this test, and she didn't think it was important. And she didn't know what it was about. And she said to me later, Eleanor, do you remember what a fuss you made about that test? I was in the library, and I've always wanted to be in a library [laughter], and it didn't make any difference. She had come to learn.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (27:58):
After our training centers in the WPA, where we were trying to train these 2000 teachers in workers' education. And after this training, we got a letter from this woman in Mississippi who just said, this "I'm running out of economics, what shall I do next?" [laughter] [inaudible]

Orlie Pell (28:24):
Give me information about courses that are shot easy and cheap [laughter].

Eleanor Coit (28:28):
And freely, I thought it was.

Orlie Pell (28:31):
Well, free. [cross-talk] Short, easy and free.

Eleanor Coit (28:35):
Yes. From all over the country, from teachers and workers, and how she understood each community well enough to answer them is, was always a matter of great--I just thought you were remarkable, because she learned enough about the community and about the resources in the area to really be helpful.

Interviewer (28:56):
Would you please comment on the allowances that you made for the foreign students that attended Bryn Mawr? I recall a particular example in which you, uh, decided to outline the map of the United States on the gym floor. And you had students standing on certain parts, certain parts of the gym floor, and they would, uh, apparently they represented a certain part of the United States. And in that way you taught, you were taught the, uh, foreign students, the geography of the United States. And I was wondering whether or not in doing so you had to resort to different techniques that in trying to reach foreign students.

Jane (Hilda Worthington) Smith (29:43):
It was Amy Hughes that suggested in 1927 that we try to get some students from other countries. She was going abroad that year. And she helped us organize committees in England and Sweden and Denmark. And we had one in Germany for a while and then Belgium. But, uh, those students, um, they, they came over and the, those committees raised their travel. And we gave them scholarships. I remember something about that, that map of the United States, but I also remember one of the foreign students who had come over in the early days as an immigrant. And she looked at a map, a map of the world and was very much puzzled. And she said, "my God, did I come west when I came here."