Revolutionary Art, Innovative Intellect, and Community Education for the Masses
1913–14 was a turning point for the Ferrer Association and the Modem School movement in America. The Ferrer Association, led by Joseph Cohen, started a movement of the out-of-work, the Conference of the Unemployed. When the movement began protesting at local New York City churches, Irish police officers came crashing down on the protestors’ mostly Italian and Jewish heads with nightsticks. The New York City police again committed brutalities when mass meetings to protest unemployment were held at Union Square. The Modern School was on the side of the toiling masses intending to liberate them by teaching them not what to think but how to think.
Moreover, when John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Standard Oil called in the National Guard to Ludlow, Colorado to combat striking miners there, the Guardsmen massacred the workers who had committed no violent acts. In response to the Ludlow Massacre, the Ferrer Association protested in front of the Standard Oil corporate headquarters on Lexington Avenue After the anarchist press called for revenge on Standard Oil for the Ludlow Massacre, a bomb intended for the Rockefeller Mansion unintentionally detonated in the Ferrer Center on June 22, 1914 killing three anarchists. Violent domsetic terrorism cripples social movements. Peaceful activism is the way but this is easy to say when the police are not cracking your heads.
The Ferrer Center never recovered from this mortal wound. The center was subsequently placed under federal and local police surveillance. Becky Edelsohn, a Ferrer Center anarchist declared that “all the violence that has been committed by the labor movement since the dawn of history wouldn’t equal one day of violence committed by the capitalist class in power.”
Robert and Delia Hutchinson jointly assumed the Modem School’s directorship post in September, 1914 when Cora Bennett Stephenson resigned. By this time, police spies had infiltrated the Modem School to snuff out all of the post-Ludlow “conspirators. “ Because of police (and social) pressure, Alden Freeman, the financial pillar of the Modem School, pulled all of his public support.
When anarchists Frank Abamo and Carmine Carbone were accused of planting bombs in St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Church of St. Alphonsus on October 13, 1914, the five year anniversary of the execution of Ferrer, anti-radical sentiment gripped the city, The Modern School radicals thus considered themselves to be safer somewhere other than New York. Therefore, on May 16, 1915 the Modem School retreated to rural Stelton, New Jersey, while the Ferrer Center perilously remained in the city until 1918 when anti-radical hysteria that followed America’s enfry into the war drove it out of business.
The retreat from New York City to the countryside of New Jersey in 1915 was rushed and therefore not carefully thought out. Harry Kelly noted that “we built our community around a school, something which had never been done before. Communities always come first and schools after but we reversed the order. “ Nevertheless, the city dwellers were not prepared for starting a self-contained community that resembled the “Old Country” of Europe that they inhabited as children. Joseph Cohen admitted; “We selected a homesite without knowing anything about the requirements of soil, drainage, shade, bathing facilities,” laying streets, or planting trees.” The children grew their own vegetable gardens. There were classes in pottery, brickmaking, and printing. Joseph Ishill, a Russian printer, printed two hundred and fifty books and pamphlets that could not be published in commercial channels. Daniel De Leon’s son led star-gazing sessions with his telescope. This was a community built around a school, a first in the United States of America.
By 1916, the American mind was changing amid the pressures of world war. Malcolm Cowley remembered that in the winter of 1916–17 his Harvard University professors stopped talking about the republic of letters and instead started talking about patriotism.
The Blast and Mother Earth were banned from the mails in the interest of national security. Goldman and Berkman were imprisoned for their membership in the Non-Conscription League. Even Dewey was subsequently fired from his professorship at Columbia University for opposing the war. The Modem School of New York City was forced to retreat to the country, thereby severing its ties to Greenwich Village, the center of radical ideas in America from 1909–15. It was not as if anarchists were in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries anyway. They were so feared that as early as 1907 they were no longer allowed entry into the United States. Domestic paranoia over radical domestic elements following. Socialists, communists, and anarchsists were not welcome.
America’s entry into World War I in 1917 only increased. In the United States from 1917–19, a heated national campaign was prosecuted by Congress and district attorneys against all vocal opponents to World War I.
Be that as it may, it is undeniable that the Modem School movement in New York City, influenced by European and American traditions about child-centered libertarian education still remains with us. It is clear that the state will not willingly give up its monopoly over the educational system. To be effective, anti-govemment, freedom-loving educators will have to have financially viable schools. The directors will have to be knowledgable enough to raise suffcient funds while convincing Americans that their mission is part of the American radical tradition of independent thinking but do not condone terrorism against innocent people.
The fear of anarchists as bomb throwers does not generally hold tue, though it does have certain factual precedents inherent in the demise of the Modem School movement in New York City from 1913–1915. Many anarchists just believe anything but communal government is evil. The statements and actions of the teachers and directors of the Modem School in New York City during this time prove that they celebrated love, reason, and passion in teaching children and adults to learn to think for themselves, which is revolutionary to the church and state establishment in any epoch of human history.
But, Americans will not tolerate terrorism against innocent people as the fall of the Modern School movement in New York City in 1915 and the bombings in Oklahoma City, Kenya, and across America and the world teach us. Still having a place where even the most militant individuals can go to speak their minds will allow the marketplace of ideas to be free and most productive. The community lyceum must open again for this generation which understands the corruption in government and the greed for money as much as the radicals in New York City did over a hundred years ago. Great ideas never die, they just take a while to get around to everybody, at least until cyberspace changed all that.
