page_title: Brookwood Labor College
section_title: The 1928 AFL attack on Brookwood
hierarchical_section_title: Brookwood Labor College / AFL conflicts with Brookwood / The 1928 AFL attack on Brookwood
caption_attribution_description: English: William Green, American labor leader
context_page_description: Brookwood Labor College was a labor college located at 109 Cedar Road in Katonah, New York, United States. Founded as Brookwood School in 1919 and established as a college in 1921, it was the first residential labor college in the country. Its founding and longest-serving president was A. J. Muste. The school was supported by affiliate unions of the American Federation of Labor until 1928.
  The Brookwood faculty's emphasis on trade union militancy and on advocacy of socialism was opposed by the AFL's Executive Council, which pressured the AFL's unions to withdraw support for the school. Brookwood was later riven by internal dissent over whether it should support militant unionism or remain strictly an educational organization.
  Suffering from financial difficulties, Brookwood closed in 1937. It is considered one of the most influential labor colleges in American history and was known as "labor's Harvard." Its best known alumnus was Walter Reuther.
context_section_description: Green acted on the information he collected by secretly authorizing AFL Executive Council member Matthew Woll to investigate Brookwood even further. Woll was president of the International Photo-Engravers Union of North America, an AFL vice president, one of the most conservative of all the AFL union leaders, and chairman of the executive committee of the WEB.
  Woll's report was delivered to the AFL Executive Council in August 1928. The report was secret, and no full version has ever been released. Historians have identified, however, that the report concluded that all faculty at Brookwood held left-wing political views, that most of the faculty taught communist philosophies, that three of them served on the faculty of the Worker's School (which was organized and supported by the Communist Party), and that Muste was a fervent communist. The report accused Brookwood of hosting "pro-Soviet demonstrations" and teaching "anti-religious doctrine" and "doctrines contrary to American Federation of Labor policies". On August 8, the AFL leadership advised all its member unions to withdraw moral and financial support for Brookwood.
  The Executive Council formally ratified its August 8 announcement on October 29. Muste denounced the Executive Council's action. He said he asked Green for a hearing on the charges many times, but received no response. Green countered that the AFL asked Brookwood to respond to the charges, which it never did. The executive council of the Teachers Union, a left-wing educational union led by Abraham Lefkowtiz that represented teachers in the New York City public school system, voted to denounce the AFL's October 29 action.
  Brookwood and the AFL agreed to a truce in the war of words in mid-November. The purpose of the truce was to give the school time to respond to the charges contained in the AFL report. As part of the informal agreement, Muste agreed not to press to overturn the Executive Council's resolution on the floor of the upcoming AFL convention.  In return, the AFL Executive Council agreed not to publish a supplementary report that contained additional charges against the school.
  The AFL convention opened on November 19, 1928. On November 24, the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employees of America asked the Executive Council to make its August 8 report public so that unions could judge for themselves the truthfulness and severity of the allegations made against the school. But the Executive Council declined to do so. The Brookwood issue did not come up before the delegates again until November 27. There was bitter debate on the convention floor regarding the accusations. Green revealed the existence of the letter signed by five students which he had received in 1927, inflaming the delegates. Benjamin Schlesinger, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, defended the school by noting that it had donated $100,000 to the union during a 1926 strike. James B. Rankin, president of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, tried to undermine the Woll report by declaring Brookwood convicted by "uncertain evidence" and "without a trial or official charges".
  The debate over Brookwood lasted until November 29, the final day of the convention.  That day, the Executive Council re-approved its October 29 resolution. That same day, in a nearly unanimous vote, the delegates to the AFL convention approved Woll's unreleased report and the Executive Council's October 29 resolution.
  The AFL convention's action was also denounced by many.  John Dewey and author and workers' education expert Marius Hansome defended Brookwood publicly after the convention. Many AFL unions tried for some time to continue their support for Brookwood, arguing that the school deserved a full, public hearing on the charges. In February 1929, 35 Brookwood alumni—including several international union vice presidents, labor journal editors, the heads of labor colleges, and state federation officials—wrote a letter to William Green protesting the AFL's action. But neither Green nor 
caption: William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, who was personally antagonistic to Brookwood.
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