THE EARLY YEARS OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL AND ITS ADVERSARIES: 1932-1942 ANGELA JEANNINE SMITH Approved: ___________________________________________ Robert Jones Major Professor
Nov 18, 2014
THE EARLY YEARS OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL AND ITS ADVERSARIES: 1932-1942
ANGELA JEANNINE SMITH
Approved:
___________________________________________Robert JonesMajor Professor
___________________________________________Janice M. LeoneReader, Department Chair
___________________________________________Michael D. AllenVice Provost for Research & Dean, College of Graduate Studies
MIDDLE TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY
THE EARLY YEARS OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL
AND ITS ADVERSARIES: 1932-1942
ANGELA JEANNINE SMITH
A MASTERS THESIS
SUBMITTED TO
THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF REQUIREMENTS FOR
THE MASTER OF ARTS DEGREE IN HISTORY
MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE
MAY 2007
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A special thanks is due to some of the people who assisted me in completing this
project. Susan Williams at the Highlander Research and Education Center has been a
great help and opened the New Market archives to me for much of my early research.
The time I spent in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Wisconsin Historical Society was a joy; it
was the best experience I have had in an archive, and I am indebted to the wonderfully
helpful staff. Susan Gordon and the staff at Tennessee State Library and Archives were
very accommodating as well. Teresa Gray, Vanderbilt Special Collections and University
Archives archivist, was particularly helpful in my research. For guiding me along the
way, I am grateful to Dr. Robert Jones and Dr. Janice Leone, my thesis committee.
Finally, to Linda Quigley, thanks for joining me on the path.
ii
ABSTRACT
Myles Horton, a college-educated son of the rural South, believed adult education
could improve the bleak existence of Appalachian families across the Cumberland
Plateau. Horton and Don West co-founded Highlander Folk School in 1932 in Grundy
County, Tennessee, where some of the poorest families in the country had lived for
generations. Highlander gained its greatest national attention in the 1950s and ‘60s when
Rosa Parks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders studied non-violent
protest there, and opponents fought it on racial and political grounds. From the day its
doors opened, however, rumors of communist leanings and opposition to its pro-union
teaching plagued Highlander. One of the most vocal enemies was John E. Edgerton, a
woolen mill owner from Lebanon, Tennessee, and president of the National Association
of Manufacturers from 1922-1932, who used every opportunity to thwart the school.
Highlander, however, had allies as well, and they worked with the school’s staff to
counter the adversaries and ultimately provide support for the school that has now
survived seventy-five years.
iii
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..............................................................................................................ii
CHAPTER
1. INTRODUCTION....................................................................................................................1
2. BACKGROUND.............................................................................................................10
3. THE FOUNDING AND EARLY WORK OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL.........21
4. ADVERSARIES OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL................................................55
5. ALLIES OF HIGHLANDER FOLK FOLK SCHOOL...................................................85
6. CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................102
BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................................110
iv
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
When struggling coal miners went on strike in Wilder, Tennessee, in the summer
of 1932, they were unaware that an idea that could improve their lives was emerging just
a hundred miles away. Myles Horton, a college-educated son of the rural South, believed
adult education could improve the bleak, isolated subsistence of Appalachian families
like those in the mining communities scattered across the Cumberland Plateau. When he
was growing up in Savannah in West Tennessee, Horton’s mother taught him that his
duty was to serve those in need. He enlarged that belief, explaining, “It’s the principle of
trying to serve people and building a loving world.”1 The place he would start would be
in Grundy County, Tennessee, south of Wilder and the eleventh poorest county in the
nation, where he opened Highlander Folk School in November 1932. 2 He was twenty-
seven years old, and the work of Highlander would occupy him, despite many setbacks,
for more than fifty years. At its inception, Highlander’s primary aim was to support and
educate adults in the Appalachian region as they struggled against social and economic
injustice. A key element of the struggle was the need for a progressive labor movement to
improve the plight of workers in the mining and textile industries; Highlander quickly
incorporated union education as part of its central mission. These rural workers depended
1 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 7.
2 Charles Allred, Grundy County, Tennessee: Relief in a Coal Mining Community (Knoxville, TN: TN Agriculture Experiment Station, University of Tennessee, 1936), 2.
1
2
on the companies not only for wages, but also for housing, food, and other necessities to
maintain merely a hardscrabble existence in the Southern mountains. As Highlander
sought to educate rural and industrial leaders for a new social order that could elevate the
workers, there was a backlash from powerful figures in business and media.
From the outset, negative press reports that charged Highlander with communist
leanings plagued the school. The motivation for such rumors and accusations was clear
when Highlander became deeply involved in training civil rights leaders in the late 1940s
and 1950s, a time when deep-seated racism was challenged. What has not been
previously examined in depth, however, is the role of the adversaries that brought the
same charges nearly two decades earlier than that, essentially from the time Highlander
opened its doors. In the process of promoting and establishing the Highlander idea,
Horton made some powerful enemies. An examination of primary sources shows that
their opposition had an impact on how the public perceived the mission of the school.
The most vocal adversaries were John E. Edgerton, owner of Lebanon Woolen Mills and
president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM); powerful newspapers,
including the Nashville Banner, under the leadership of staunchly Republican James
Stahlman, and the more liberal Tennessean, led by Silliman Evans, an active Democrat,
but one who supported John Nance Garner over Roosevelt in 1939 and denounced
organized labor; and C.H. Kilby, the Tennessee Consolidated Coal Company secretary
who, in his obsession to rid Grundy County of Highlander, formed the Grundy County
Crusaders in 1940.3
3 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 75.
3
Each of these men was responsible for a great deal of misinformation
disseminated through the press and in other public arenas that created suspicion in the
region toward Highlander. They had a national forum, and media in Tennessee and
beyond not only published these rumors, but also generated some of them. Many of the
workers, while they wanted to better their lives, knew of the charges and were reluctant
to accept help from Highlander. That suspicion was already present in the Wilder coal
strike, the impetus for Horton’s first effort at union organizing after Highlander opened.
Early in 1933, a Methodist team that went to Wilder to assess the workers’ situation
quickly discovered that wariness. When the volunteers asked some of the striking
workers if they knew Horton, the men told the visitors, “They knew him but didn’t have
much to do with him because they feared he might be a ‘Red’ and they didn’t want any
‘Reds’ in their midst.”4 Because of those concerns, the workers were suspicious of those
who represented Highlander.
Just as Highlander was gaining notoriety as “red,” however, communists
themselves turned a cold shoulder to the school. Scott Bates, a retired Sewanee professor,
noted the irony, pointing out, “At the same time Highlander was acquiring the communist
label, communist leaders in the South discovered that the open discussion techniques at
Highlander were not favorable to promoting the party line, and the communist faithful
were instructed not to go to the school. The communists actually boycotted Highlander!”5
4 “Trouble in the Tennessee Coalfields, A Methodist Church Report,” The Highlander Collection, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.
5 Scott Bates is Professor Emeritus of French and Film Studies at The University of the South in Sewanee. Active in the civil rights movement, Bates has been on the Highlander Folk School Board of Directors since 1958. Scott Bates, “The Highlander Folk School and The University of the South,” Sewanee Theological Review, no. 3 (2003): 352.
4
Will Campbell, a writer and minister who was active in the civil rights movement, shared
a recollection in 2005 that gave insight into the situation. Campbell said that later in
Horton’s life, he asked the Highlander founder if he had ever been a member of the
Communist Party. Horton replied, “Lord, no, we were more radical than the Communists.
We wanted real democracy.”6 In fact, Horton believed it was critical that Highlander, to
fulfill its mission as an educational institution, remain unaffiliated with any groups tied to
political or religious philosophies. “The school is in no way connected with the Socialist
or Communist parties,” he said in October 1934. “It is controlled by the teaching staff
and is financed by contributions from individuals or groups interested in the work we are
doing.” Horton went on to say faculty and students were responsible for all the work,
including growing their own food supplies, and no one was given a salary. In Horton’s
mind, that structure allowed the school to operate without depending on or affiliating
with any other organization. “We feel that we can contribute more to the radical labor
movement in this way. The school is non-religious. However, individuals on the staff
claim a religious motivation.”7 Though the school was committed to a new social order,
that order was based not on the kingdom of God but on true democracy and education.
Highlander’s staunchest adversaries, on the other hand, frequently acted out of
their own political and religious preferences in their attacks against the school. They also
acted out of fear of change in the social order to which they were accustomed, which was
perhaps their strongest motive to go up against Highlander. When reexamining those
6 The author visited Will Campbell at his residence in Mt, Juliet, Tennessee, in May 2005.
7 Myles Horton to Mr. P.J. Andreasen, 13 October 1934, Box 5, Folder 1, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
5
aligned against the school from 1932-42, it is important to examine the climate leading to
their opposition. Giant changes marked the twentieth century, and the move from an
agrarian to an industrial society in the South was difficult for the people of the
Appalachians. They had survived for generations in a region isolated by geography and
held back by poverty. Throughout history, an initial response to change has often been
that those who witness its coming try to stop it.
A number of people in power as well as a number of workers with lesser
influence attempted to block Highlander’s progressive goals for the Appalachian people.
Clearly, Highlander’s efforts to educate workers about labor threatened the established
economic and social order in the South. Those who had long been secure in that order
opposed Highlander just as they opposed the changes brought about by the New Deal to
open doors to labor and to legislate wages. The people in positions of power in the South
during the 1930s were industrialists themselves or friendly to industrialists. Low wages
were the key to the Southern advantage in industry, and Southern industrialists were
determined to keep unions out so they could maintain their edge over their Northern
counterparts. Edgerton, who spoke against Highlander from 1932 until his death in 1938,
and Stahlman, whose active campaign of opposing the school did not appear publicly
until the late ‘30s, were not going to stand by and do nothing while their livelihoods were
threatened. Like many other powerful business figures of the day, they had means and
motive to throw up obstacles to protect their interests, and they used both to try to stop
Highlander’s work.
The adversaries did not succeed in shutting down the school, and this can be
attributed to support from a broad spectrum of Highlander allies. Many newspaper editors
6
received letters in support of Highlander, negating the accusations of the adversaries.
Among the backers were Abram Nightingale, a Congregationalist minister in Tennessee;
Reinhold Niebuhr, a writer and professor of theology in New York; Lillian Johnson, an
educator who had worked in both traditional academic settings as well as a community
school she set up in Tennessee; Alva Taylor, a professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School; a
number of labor union allies, both leaders and workers; and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
They also contributed money and time in support of Highlander. Some of these people
supported Highlander as part of their spiritual quest, following the Social Gospel, and
others contributed because they believed in the labor movement, and they wanted to see
that it succeed in the South. Opposition notwithstanding, Highlander also had powerful
supporters in its mission.
Ample sources on Highlander Folk School are available for this period. The staff
of Highlander saved letters they had written and received, staff meeting notes, fliers,
newspaper clippings, teaching, and curriculum materials, most of which are housed in
Madison, Wisconsin, at the Wisconsin Historical Society, although some remain in the
library at Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee. In
addition to these primary sources, John Glen, professor of history at Ball State
University, has written what is to date the definitive history, Highlander, No Ordinary
School.8 Glen’s research reflects a thorough examination of primary material in his
chronicle of Highlander from the beginning through the early 1980s. Several biographies
of Highlander’s staffers contribute to the understanding of the early period. Myles
Horton’s The Long Haul, An Autobiography, written with Herbert and Judith Kohl,
8 Glen, Highlander.
details his perspective about the early period of Highlander.9 Frank Adams’ 1975 book,
Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander, written with Myles Horton, is written
in a narrative style and chronicles the history of Highlander.10 Adams also wrote a
biography of Highlander staff member James Dombrowski that gives a clearer
perspective of what was going on between the personalities at Highlander in the early
years.11 The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major Programs, by Aimee Isgrig
Horton, gives a very detailed account of the early programs.12 The breadth of sources
available allows for a depth of understanding that is rare in historical research. The
information comes from a variety of published and archival materials and offers the
researcher different perspectives from key figures.
In stark contrast to the considerable amount of documentation available on
Highlander, there are few primary or secondary sources to draw on to document the
adversaries. Though quoted often in a wide range of periodicals during the 1920s and
1930s, there has been no scholarly research conducted on John Edgerton, president of the
National Association of Manufacturers from 1921 to 1931. Most of the primary
information on Edgerton is found in newspapers; American Industries, the official
publication of NAM; the records of the Southern States Industrial Council at the
9 Horton, The Long Haul, An Autobiography.
10 Mr. Frank Adams, with Mr. Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, 1975).
11 Frank T. Adams, James A. Dombrowski, An American Heretic, 1897-1983 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
12 Aimee Isgrig Horton, The Highlander Folk School: A History of its Major Programs (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971; reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989).
7
Tennessee State Library and Archives; articles in the Alumni Bulletin for Vanderbilt
University during the 1920s and ‘30s, and in the Highlander Folk School (HSF) Archive
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The HFS archive contains a letter from
Edgerton to Myles Horton in 1934 declining an invitation to speak at Highlander, as well
as many SSIC documents that warn southern industrialists about Highlander. All of the
Highlander secondary sources note Edgerton and his negative response to Highlander and
its mission. American Industries printed the transcripts of each Edgerton speech at the
NAM annual meetings. Additionally, there were articles by Edgerton on various topics
during his tenure as president of the organization. Obituaries were helpful in developing
the chronology of his life.
Interestingly, there is little scholarly research conducted on NAM, even though it
was historically a large and highly influential industrial organization that remains today
one of the most powerful lobbying forces for industry. I discovered two dissertations,
one published in 1927 by Albion Taylor, Labor Policies of the National Association of
Manufacturers,13 and a second, The National Association of Manufacturers: A Study in
Ideology, offered in 1950 by John Stalker.14
The opposition of publisher James Stahlman was chronicled in his newspaper, the
Nashville Banner, while the Grundy County Crusaders are documented extensively in the
HSF archives at Wisconsin and in newspaper archives in Tennessee. When the Banner
ceased publication in 1998, the files of the newspaper were donated to the Nashville
13 Albion Guildford Taylor, “Labor Policies of the National Association of Manufacturers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1927).
14 John Nellis Stalker, Jr., “The National Association of Manufacturers: A Study in Ideology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1950).
8
Public Library. The Highlander file is filled with clippings from the late 1930s to the
1960s that seem to provide almost exclusively negative coverage of Highlander; the file
also includes some correspondence reflecting Stahlman’s opposition to Highlander.
9
CHAPTER II: BACKGROUND
After the stock market crash of 1929, the people of the United States began a
descent into one of the most difficult periods in American history, and it is not surprising
that Highlander Folk School took root in that era. Tough conditions gripped the entire
nation, though the South was particularly hard hit. Even before the 1929 stock market
crash, the economic condition of the rural South, where most of the region’s people lived,
was one of scarcity and hardship. Widespread joblessness and the accompanying lack of
income brought on hunger and poor health. In addition, the region was in the midst of a
shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy.
Some reformers embraced socialist and communist philosophies, and became
members of those political parties as they looked for alternative solutions to the economic
situation. By 1933, they were part of a widespread demand for relief. A few called for a
new economic system, because, in their eyes, capitalism had clearly failed. Evidence for
the failure was the continued downward spiral of the economy with no end in sight and
poverty and hunger throughout the country, while many others supported reforms to
improve the existing system of free enterprise. The government seemed impotent to solve
the economic problems that plagued the nation; many believed a revolution would come,
and that it would be political as well as social because of pervasive suffering.15
15 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957; reprint, New York: Mariner Books, 2003), 206.
10
11
Conservative state governments and business leaders in the South were alarmed
with the mood in the populace that shifted from despondency to agitation. The mood was
demonstrated by strikes in the early 1930s in the mines, such as the one in Wilder,
Tennessee, and in the textile mills, such as those in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and
Gastonia, North Carolina. Conservatives faced New Deal federal regulations that were
sympathetic to unions and threatening to the power they had over their companies. They
responded with increased militancy against unions and a public relations propaganda war
they had the means to create and win. Business leaders such as John E. Edgerton, a textile
mill owner and president of the National Association of Manufacturers, and James
Stahlman, publisher of the conservative Nashville Banner, one of Tennessee’s most
powerful newspapers, met the cry for reform with control, spin, and intimidation. These
men and others in business and government wanted to maintain the status quo and, thus,
their power. The stage was set for the conflict between the agents of change and the old
school Southern leaders.16
For fifty years, Southern boosters had marketed the South as the place to move
industrial production plants. Both wages and cost of living were low, and unions were
rare. All these conditions came together to keep prices of the goods produced in the
Southern plants competitive with their economic rivals in the North. The industrialists, to
preserve these conditions, followed the same paternalistic system of control as their
ancestors, who leased acreage to sharecroppers who lived and worked on the land and
paid their rent from the return on the crops they grew. The system was blatantly
16 Marian D. Irish, “The Proletariat South,” The Journal of Politics, no. 3 (August 1940): 231-258.
12
exploitive of the poor, but the top-down control of government by landowners in the
South kept the system alive for a long time. As industry replaced some of the region’s
agriculture, industrialists used a firm hand and instilled fear in the workers to keep unions
out, to hold wages down, and to maintain long-established dominance. The managed to
maintain the same system of wealthy, white paternalism that existed in the sharecropping
system. John Egerton, a contemporary journalist and author (with no connection to
industrialist John E. Edgerton), described the system and its tone in his book, Speak Now
Against the Day:
There is no way to convey now an explicit sense of the look, smell, sound and feel of the South in that somber autumn of 1932, but in its practical effect, if not literally and historically, this was a feudal land, an Americanized version of a European society in the Middle Ages. It was rural, agricultural, isolated. It had its ruling nobles, its lords of the plantation manor—and its peasants, it vassals. Its values were rooted in the land, in stability and permanence, in hierarchy and status, in caste and class and race. The highest virtues were honor and duty, loyalty and obedience. Every member of the society—man and woman, white and black—knew his or her place, and it was an unusual person who showed flagrant disregard for the assigned boundaries and conventions.17
Myles Horton, whose values were shaped by rural experience, had worked side by
side with those who historically accepted those boundaries, even if they chafed at their
restrictions. As the depression dragged on, however, the boundaries strained mightily as
desperate workers tried to survive. Labor unions, Horton believed, were key to that
survival, and he wanted to share that knowledge with those who needed it most.18
17 John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 19.
18 Myles Horton TN, to P.J. Andreasen, 13 October 1934, Box 5, Folder 1, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
13
Even before the depression, farming had started to suffer in the region.
Throughout the 1920s, cotton prices went up and down, affected year after year by
uncontrollable variables. One year it was the loss of foreign markets; the next, an insect
scourge. Because so much wealth was historically derived from cotton, landowners
continued to believe the next year – and the next – would bring a bumper crop. The
pattern of boom and bust continued, however, and natural disasters such as floods,
droughts, and tornadoes, as well as soil depletion, forced the hands of many landowners,
some of whom had to leave their farms and move to cities and mill towns to find work.19
Historian Louis M. Kyriakoudes, in his book, The Social Origins of the Urban South:
Race, Gender and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890-1930, notes the
increase in migration between the rural areas of middle Tennessee and Nashville. “In the
countryside, limited employment opportunities off the farm meant that rural people
would have to search for work in other places.”20 With the population heavily weighted to
the rural areas, this pattern most dramatically affected the poorest farmers. Thus the crash
of 1929 was not the disaster in the minds of most Southerners that it was to those in other
regions of the country. More people in the South were already suffering from the
agricultural conditions of the 1920s than were impacted by the stock market crash in the
fall of 1929.21
19 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 201.
20 Louis M. Kyriakoudes, The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennesee 1890-1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 158.
21 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University and the Littlerield Fund for Southern History, 1967), 354-355.
14
The Southern way of life was built primarily around an agricultural economy, but
by the late 1920s, industrial production was growing rapidly. Textile mills were opening
in rural areas all over the South. While a majority of Southerners still lived on farms and
many were sharecroppers, they were not making a decent living. To these burdened
families, industrial employment was a new and seemingly promising option. The
promise, however, was generally more advantageous to the employer. “Most incoming
employers were concerned primarily with getting maximum productivity out of work
forces consisting largely of ex-sharecroppers, females, and children, none of whom were
likely to complain about wages and working condition or otherwise develop a well-
defined sense of class consciousness,” according to historian James C. Cobb, in The
Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1980.
Cobb pointed out that the industrialists were more concerned with low taxes than with
schools or hospitals, with freedom from regulation rather than leadership, the latter
secured by the closed political system that protected industry in labor-management
conflicts.22 As a result, the poor farmers who looked to industry for jobs met head-on a
system that maintained low wages, poor working conditions, and a concentration of
power that shut them out of any negotiations. “The middle class was small and politically
largely inert,” author Richard K. Scher wrote in his book, Politics in the New South:
Republicanism, Race and Leadership in the Twentieth Century, “State governments,
which might have attempted some form of business regulation, were for the most part in
22 James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-1980 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 2.
15
the hands of conservative businessmen and wealthy elites whose sympathies lay with the
factory owners, not the workers.”23
By the election of 1932, the nation had been in the depression for three years.
Unemployment was at record highs, with one out of four men throughout the nation
without work. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected over President Herbert Hoover with a
mandate for a “New Deal” for America, and it was also significant that together the
Socialist and Communist party candidates tallied nearly one million votes. People were
desperate for change, and in Roosevelt’s “First Hundred Days,” he initiated programs
designed to bring relief and some hope to the suffering masses.24
Hoover’s failure to act as the Great Depression deepened caused his political
demise and offered an opportunity to the leader who could win the public’s trust with a
message of hope and change. By 1932, when there was a powerful demand for active
relief, the idea that a revolution might occur was acknowledged throughout the country.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., noting the shifting mood in 1931 toward some manner
of concrete action, wrote, “A malaise was seizing many Americans, a sense at once
depression and exhilarating, that capitalism itself was finished.”25 The country was
demanding that government do something to relieve the suffering of its citizens. Even the
business community was aware of the discontent and misery, and more than a few
observers warned that the dire conditions “might produce a new American revolution.”26 23 Richard K. Scher, Politics in the New South: Republicanism, Race and
Leadership in the Twentieth Century, (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 24.
24 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 222.
25 Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, 205-206.
26 Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (New York: Times Books, 1993; New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 90.
16
Radical thought was a by-product of this shift in thinking. The old solutions were not
working to solve the crisis. A new and different solution was needed to help the nation’s
suffering citizens. As Schlesinger observed, “Now depression was offering radicalism its
long awaited chance.”27 Radicalism was on target to take advantage of the opportunity.
The Progressive, Socialist, and Communist parties were active at both the national level
and local level in some districts. Socialist Norman Thomas was immensely popular and
garnered the most votes of his five presidential races in 1932. As the depression
deepened, the speeches and writings of radical thinkers grew increasingly popular among
some people who were searching for answers that government, industry, and business had
not yet offered.28
The circumstances of the economic struggle brought national attention to the
South, which many outside the region saw as just a curious collection of unimpressive
towns and uneducated people. The North, however, did not have a monopoly on radical
ideas. Those ideas existed at universities and within small groups of thinkers in the South,
but historically their movements had little chance of creating a popular uprising. The
depression, however, changed all that. Business theorist Roger Babson, writing in 1934,
suggested that the nation was on a bridge “connecting two islands – one called Capitalism
and one called Socialism.” Babson believed the people could quickly turn back to a free
market economy or just as quickly move to embrace socialism. But, he said, “It is
equally possible that we shall become much more revolutionary and witness tremendous
27 Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, 206.
28 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 218-248, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957; reprint, New York: Mariner Books, 2003), 205-215.
social, business and investment changes during the next ten years.”29 It was a possibility
that did not escape the American government. Several years later, a government agency,
the National Emergency Council, released the “Report on Economic Conditions of the
South” that documented the deficiencies of Southern life. After reading the report,
Franklin Roosevelt observed, “The South presents right now the nation’s No. 1 economic
problem – the nation’s problem not merely the South’s.”30 The dismal economic and
social situation in the South created fear and speculation that a popular uprising could
occur. Capitalism was ultimately stabilized, however, and though it was much more
common to see radicalism during this period, World War II ultimately delivered the
nation into a better economy with better living conditions for most.31
No one could have safely predicted that in 1932, however, when the abysmal
conditions of the Great Depression reached deep into every corner of the South. It was
into this bleak world that Highlander Folk School was born. The idea for the school came
about as a result of economic and social changes that marked the early 1930s. The dire
conditions prompted the labor slant; in other economic circumstances, perhaps it would
have taken a different direction. Myles Horton, however, saw an opportunity in the
circumstances of the Great Depression that would allow Highlander to become not just an
29 Roger W. Babson, Washington and the Revolutionists; a Characterization of Recovery Policies and of the People Who Are Giving Them Effect (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1933), ix-x.
30 David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions in the South with Related Documents (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 42.
31 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 218-219.17
agent for community education, but also a distinctive and widespread force in support of
the common man.32
On the national scene, others were working for the common man by different
means – indeed had been working since the turn of the century. Organized labor in the
country had gone through some ups and downs since the Civil War. There was a peak of
activity at the end of the century with the first presidential campaign of Socialist Eugene
V. Debs, a union member and one of a group of men who founded the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW). The Socialist Party movement gained momentum with its strong
pro-union platform, but ebbed with the economy. The IWW had nearly disappeared by
World War I, leaving the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as the dominant union
organization during most of the first quarter of the twentieth century.33
The AFL was a collection of craft based unions with a rigid hierarchy in its
organizational structure, a clear pecking order, and greater concern about individual
issues of workers than about larger social change. By the late 1920s, jobs produced by
industrialism were shifting the base of workers in the country from highly specialized
workers to mass production positions. This change, along with the AFL’s inability to get
behind industrial unionism for the burgeoning industrial workers, resulted in the
formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935.34
32 Dale Jacobs, ed., The Myles Horton Reader, Education for Social Change (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 80.
33 David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987),
34 Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 29.
18
Highlander’s mission of adult labor education subsequently earned validation as
New Deal programs were established and awareness of labor options increased
throughout the South. While Highlander and Horton reacted to support the forces that
would promote labor, there was equal and opposite reaction from Southern industrialists
who were adamantly against any growth of labor unions. Horton’s nemesis from his
college days, John E. Edgerton, saw unions – not organic to the South – coming from
other regions to organize. A year after Highlander’s founding, Edgerton left the National
Association of Manufacturers. He joined other industrialists to form the Southern States
Industrial Council (SSIC), described this way in the Tennessee Manufacturers Bulletin:
“The South has been discriminated against [in New Deal programs] and . . . this inequity
ought to be removed as soon as possible in order to place our section in a competitive
position.”35
Efforts like those of Highlander, the AFL, and the National Recovery Act of
1933, all of which supported unions and all of which many Southern industrial leaders
despised, combined to create an unprecedented threat to Southern progress. In fact,
Edgerton said, "To some of this section's competitors in other sections the opportunity
had come to 'reform' the South and to lift it to a higher economical level and, incidentally
to destroy its competitive power.” In the minds of Edgerton and his fellow Southern
industrialists, this was not just a threat to generations of paternalism, but to their
economic viability. These leaders could not sit back and allow Myles Horton and his
35 Tennessee Manufacturers Association, “Tennessee Manufacturers Association Bulletin,” bulletin, Nashville, TN, 26 December 1933, Box 11, Folder 10, MSS 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
19
cohorts in the AFL and later in the CIO spread the union message to workers across the
South.36
36 Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991,), 22-23.
20
CHAPTER III: THE FOUNDING AND EARLY WORK OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL
Myles Horton and the Highlander Idea
The seed for Highlander Folk School took root with Myles Horton when his
summer jobs as a teenager included work in a cannery, a sawmill, and a box factory near
his hometown of Savannah in West Tennessee. When he heard factory owners insulting
workers, he took it personally, and his awareness of the injustice and inequality at the
bottom of the economic spectrum made a powerful impression.37 That awareness was
fresh in his mind in mid-1927 when the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. employed him for
the summer while he was on vacation from his studies at Cumberland University in
Lebanon, Tennessee. His job was to direct vacation Bible schools in several Cumberland
Plateau counties, but Horton became somewhat skeptical of their usefulness in this
economically deprived area. He initiated evening meetings in the community so the rural
residents could talk about their problems, and they quickly discovered they could work
together to help each other solve them as well. This small effort was so successful that
Horton believed it was possible to replicate the experience in the more structured setting
of a school. With that in mind, he began to search for a way to establish what he initially
called a “Southern Mountain School” that would emphasize adult education and social
37 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 8.
21
22
change. In the coming years he would observe, examine, and draw on similar efforts
already under way in the United States and abroad, but his inaugural goal was to establish
a school to teach citizens of disadvantaged communities to help themselves and each
other. 38
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English from Cumberland University
in 1928, he worked for the YMCA in Tennessee for a year before he realized that he
needed more education to advance his idea. With the encouragement of Abram
Nightingale, a Crossville, Tennessee, Congregationalist minister, he decided to attend
Union Theological Seminary in New York to broaden his education and search for an
educational model that could succeed in the Southern mountains. “I went to Union
because I had problems reconciling my religious background with the economic
conditions I saw in society,” he said.39 He initially chose Union because of the presence
of Harry Ward, a professor of ethics who openly criticized capitalism and also taught
classes that incorporated the progressive ideas of the Social Gospel, a movement to put
Christian principles to work to address social problems such as poverty, child labor,
unemployment, illiteracy, and disease. Horton, who had no intention of becoming a
minister or even obtaining a degree, chose courses that kept him on the path of seeking
social justice, particularly as it applied to the plight of the working man in society.40
That concern had been very present with Horton since, while still a student at
Cumberland University, he heard local businessman John E. Edgerton lecture on the evil
38 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 11.
39 Horton, The Long Haul, 35.
40 Ibid., 46.
23
of unions. Edgerton was a Cumberland alumnus, nationally known industrialist and
owner of Lebanon Woolen Mills, a large employer in the town. Horton was not one to sit
by meekly if he thought something was unjust. That applied to a mill owner who, Horton
believed, had no right to dictate whether an individual employee could organize with
others. He responded to Edgerton’s anti-union rhetoric by going to the woolen mill and
speaking to the workers. He explained to them that they had the right to have a union and
to negotiate for improvements in wages, benefits, and working conditions. When the
university learned of Horton’s actions, he was threatened with expulsion if he returned to
the textile mill. This was the first time Horton crossed paths with Edgerton, president of
the National Association of Manufacturers from 1921-1931, and a man who would later
be responsible for many attempts to discredit Highlander Folk School. 41
Horton’s experience with the anti-union mill owner led him to begin research on
unions and union opposition. It was when he arrived in New York a couple of years later,
however, that he was exposed to organized unions for the first time. “Once I learned what
unions stood for, I realized that they provided a way in which working people could
begin to get control over their lives,” he wrote.42 According to author Aimee Horton, in
The Highlander Folk School, a History of its Major Programs 1932-1961, “His
intellectual identification with the labor movement became an emotional commitment
41 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 24; and John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 11.
42 Horton, The Long Haul, 36.
when he came in firsthand contact with sweat shops in the New York garment trade and
participated in an International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union strike.”43
His introduction to labor unions in New York was powerful, though by the time
Horton left the seminary after a year, the most important result of his experience in the
city was the development of a relationship with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the
most prominent theologians of the twentieth century. Niebuhr had just begun his teaching
career at Union and advocated a theological position called Christian Realism. This
concept that suggested "The ideal of Christian love embodied in the ethic of Jesus is an
impossibility in history; it is no longer directly applicable to the social problem."44 He
criticized the Social Gospel advocates for their idealism about human nature, but he also
believed capitalism was failing and the common man was needlessly suffering,
conditions he attributed to the dysfunction of American labor and economics. This
position appealed to Horton, and Niebuhr, in turn, encouraged Horton’s mountain school
idea. They became close friends, and Niebuhr later served as a fund-raiser, board
member, and vocal supporter of Highlander Folk School for four decades.45
While he was in New York, Horton met several other like-minded people who
would later come to work with him at Highlander. Among them were fellow students
James Dombrowski and John Thompson; and Elizabeth Hawes, an activist he met while
43 Aimee Isgrig Horton, The Highlander Folk School: A History of its Major Programs (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971; reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989), 21.
44 Harlan Beckley, Passion for Justice: Retrieving the Legacies of Walter Rauschenbusch, John A. Ryan, and Reinhold Niebuhr (Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1992), 202.
45 Richard Wightman Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 131.
24
visiting Brookwood Labor College in upstate New York. Despite the intellectual and
spiritual stimulation he got at Union, Horton still had not found a model he was
comfortable with for the mountain school.46 When he left Union Theological Seminary
and went to the University of Chicago to study sociology under Dr. Robert E. Park,
Horton said he wanted to “ see what I could learn from sociology about how to help
people solve social conflicts and change society.”47 Park, an urban sociologist, had gained
a reputation for his ideas about the process immigrants go through as they assimilate into
a new culture. Horton believed he could learn something from Park about the possibilities
for adult education in a remote, impoverished area. According to writer Frank Adams in
Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander, “Through Park, Horton came to
understand and accept the theory of crisis, conflict, and mass movements as mechanisms
for social change, and these elements were to become fundamental to his concept of
education.”48
While in Chicago, Horton continued his pattern of working outside of school in
local settlement houses. He met Jane Addams of Hull House, a housing and education
facility opened in the 1880s to help new immigrants adjust to life in Chicago. He learned
a great deal from her about the issues of poverty, immigration acclimation, and teaching
problem-solving skills to people in practical ways. The people he wanted to educate to
solve their problems were not urban, but their poverty and inequality in society were no
46 Frank Adams, with Mr. Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1975), 11-16.
47 Horton, The Long Haul, An Autobiography, 47.
48 Adams, Unearthing Seeds of Fire, 17.25
different. Horton himself credited Addams with being “extremely helpful in getting me to
think things out.”49
It was also in Chicago that he met Aage Møller, a Lutheran minister, who
encouraged him to look at the Danish folk school as a model for his mountain school
idea. Møller, once a teacher at a folk school in his native Denmark, believed if Horton
observed folk schools there, he would likely find the model he sought. Skeptical at first,
Horton began to read everything he could find about the schools; he then realized he
needed to visit them to understand them. Foregoing an offer from Parks to be his assistant
and work toward a doctoral degree in sociology, Horton left Chicago in 1931, and
traveled to Denmark.50
Scholars had stimulated social change in Denmark in the late nineteenth century,
and Horton was interested in how they had accomplished this. The originator of the idea,
Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, a Lutheran minister, poet, and historian, began
writing about the folk school concept in 1828. Grundtvig established the first folk school
in 1844, but it soon failed because of an excessive emphasis on language. In 1851,
Kristen Kold, a shoemaker, took Grundtvig’s original idea and began the first successful
folk school. There were no textbooks, but there was plenty of singing, and students were
immersed in coursework relevant to their everyday lives, including Danish folk traditions
and art.51 According to Peter Manniche, and H. J. Fleure in Denmark, a Social
49 Horton, The Long Haul, An Autobiography, 49.
50 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 50; and John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 16.
51 Adams, Unearthing Seeds of Fire, 20.26
Laboratory, “The folk-high-school set out to help young people to work and live
together as members of the Danish community.”52 These schools are credited with
helping to create a rebirth of Danish pride, strengthen the economy, and develop a less
class-stratified society. 53
Upon arriving in Copenhagen, Horton lived with a Danish family and went to a
local folk high school to learn the country’s language. After he became more comfortable
with the language, he traveled around the country to visit some of the older folk schools
and talk to the teachers so he could understand what made this model work. On
Christmas night, 1931, Horton wrote, “I can’t sleep, but there are dreams. What you must
do is go back, get a simple place, move in and you are there. . . . You can go to school all
your life, you’ll never figure it out because you are trying to get an answer that can only
come from the people in the life situation.” The Southern mountain school had taken
shape in his mind and his trip to Denmark gave him the model he had sought. It was then
time to go back to Tennessee and create the school.54
Horton returned to New York from Denmark in May 1932 and met with Niebuhr.
Together they outlined the plan for the school and crafted a fundraising letter to send to
potential donors. The letter explained the primary mission of the proposed school:
Our project is the organization of a Southern Mountain School for the training of labor leaders in the Southern industrial areas. The Southern
52 Peter Manniche and H. J. Fleure, Denmark, a Social Laboratory: Independent Farmers, Co-Operative Societies, Folk High Schools, Social Legislation, (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad, 1939), 6.
53 Harold W. Stubblefield, Paper: “The Danish Folk High School and its Reception n the United States: 1870s-1930s,” Roger Hiemstra’s Web Page for Adult Education, available at http://www-distance.syr.edu/stubblefield.html (5 April 2006).
54 Horton, The Long Haul, An Autobiography, 55.27
mountaineers who are being drawn into the coal and textile industries are completely lacking in understanding of the problems of industry and the necessities of labor organization. We believe neither A.F. of L. nor Communist leadership is adequate to their needs. Our hope is to train radical labor leaders who will understand the need of both political and union strategy. Without local leadership a labor movement in the South is impossible. The need for such leadership becomes more urgent when it is realized that the individualistic outlook of the mountain people makes it hard for them to understand or accept leadership from without. Naturally, we will make the educational program as broad as possible and try to give the students and the community an understanding of the total problem of modern civilization. 55
The first donor was Sherwood Eddy, secretary for the international YMCA, who sent a
contribution of a hundred dollars. Eddy also agreed to serve on the advisory board along
with Niebuhr, Norman Thomas, and Kirby Page of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Within six months, thirteen hundred dollars had been raised to begin the school.56
With money coming in, Horton’s next task was to find the right location for the
school. Throughout the summer of 1932 he drove around eastern Tennessee and
Kentucky, and western North Carolina looking for a place that fit into his plan. During a
trip to Atlanta he met with Will W. Alexander, a Methodist minister, Vanderbilt School
of Religion alumnus, and executive director of the Commission on Interracial
Cooperation. After hearing Horton’s idea, Alexander told him about Don West, a young
Georgia native who wanted to begin a folk school. West worked his way through Lincoln
Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, and went on to Vanderbilt in 1928, where
professors Alva W. Taylor and Joseph K. Hart influenced him. Taylor was a professor of
55 Reinhold Niebuhr letter to potential contributors to the “Southern Mountains School,” May 27, 1932, HC Papers, Box 22.
56 Myles Horton, “Highlander Folk School, Letter No. 2,” newsletter, Monteagle, TN, Summer 1933, Box 1, Folder 3, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
28
social ethics and a proponent of the Social Gospel, and Hart was a controversial
education professor who had traveled to Denmark in 1925 and written a book about the
Danish folk schools. West had taken a year off during his studies at Vanderbilt and
traveled to Denmark to study the folk schools. After he earned a bachelor of divinity
degree at Vanderbilt in 1931, he too wanted to start a folk school in the mountain region.
With Alexander’s introduction, Horton immediately contacted West, and they agreed to
pursue the school together.57
The two men met with Abram Nightingale, the Congregationalist minister in
Crossville, Tennessee, who had encouraged Horton to attend Union Seminary. Another
key contact came out of this meeting, Nightingale told them that Lillian Johnson, an
accomplished, prominent educator, wanted someone to take over her educational efforts
in Monteagle, Tennessee, in impoverished Grundy County, so she could retire to
Florida.58
The Opening of Highlander Folk School in Grundy County
Horton and West traveled to Summerfield to talk to Johnson about using her
house and forty acres of mountain farmland for the school, and they eventually worked
out an agreement for a one-year trial. “Following a series of meetings, she made a simple
verbal agreement with Horton and West,” according to John Glen in Highlander, No
Ordinary School. “The two men could use her property for a school as long as they ran it
themselves, developed good relations with the community, and achieved tangible results
57 Glen, Highlander, 21.
58 Sherry Herbers, Ph.D. “The ‘Facts’ of the Life of Dr. Lillian Johnson Before Her Association with HFS,” (Outline presented during Highlander Conference in November 2005 in Nashville, Tennessee).
29
from their programs.” With Johnson’s blessing, Highlander Folk School officially opened
in the Summerfield community in Grundy County, Tennessee, on November 1, 1932. The
mission on which they embarked was to serve people who had for generations faced
formidable challenges from both the geography and the culture. 59
Grundy County lies between Middle and East Tennessee. Four-fifths of the
county is on the Cumberland Plateau and the other part drops one thousand feet to the
great valley of East Tennessee. Only fifty miles from Chattanooga, the area is not as
isolated as some Appalachian regions. For several generations, primary industries
produced coal and lumber. 60 The county, one of the poorest in the nation, was marked by
mountainous terrain, little tillable acreage, and damage from years of industrial abuse. 61
Because of these conditions, there were few self-sustaining farms in Grundy County.
“The coal and lumber industries on which the county had based its prosperity had
collapsed well before the Great Depression, leaving only devastated resources and
exhausted cropland that Department of Agriculture officials declared incapable of
supporting a farm population,” Glen noted.”62
59 Fount F. Crabtree, “The Wilder Coal Strike of 1932-33” (Master of Arts in History of the Graduate School of Education, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1937), 4-6; and John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 22.
60 James L. Nicholson, Grundy County (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1982), 102.
61 Charles Allred, Grundy County, Tennessee: Relief in a Coal Mining Community (Knoxville: TN Agriculture Experiment Station, University of Tennessee, 1936).
62 Glen, Highlander, 23.30
In a book published in 1946, Claudia Lewis, who came to HFS to start a nursery
school for the community in 1938, gave a detailed description of Summerfield’s physical
environment:
Here in Summerfield we will not find roads that are no more than rocky creek beds over which the traveler must make his slow way on horseback, roads leading to an even older era in which clothes, for instance, are all woven and made at home, "free school" is held one month out of the year by a man who can count a dozen eggs, and almost nothing is ever purchased from a store. Now, the highways have come in, bringing the mail buses and the Sears Roebuck catalogs. 63
She goes on to describe the houses:
I have described these houses as "shacks." That they are all alike is of course not the case. Here and there on our corner of the plateau are a few old cabins of hand-hewn logs -- the typical "picturesque" mountain cabin. Then there are the houses of the boom days that must have been somewhat pretentious when they were new, three- and four-room houses with two stories and gingerbread decorations on the porches. Lastly, there are the cabins of the familiar "box" type, successor to the log cabin all through the Southern mountains. These are the houses that have been built for the sons and daughters of the ex-miners as they marry. They are two- or three-room cabins of rough lumber, hastily erected, seldom painted.64
The area certainly was an appropriate target for a school for poor people of the
Southern mountains, but there was another attribute that fit the plan as well: Grundy
County had a history of unionization, which was uncommon in the rural South. Coal
deposits were discovered in the county in the 1850s, and by the 1880s, the Tennessee
Coal and Iron Company (TCI) was the largest employer in the county. A group of miners
organized a Tracy City assembly of the Knights of Labor in 1884, but the managers of
TCI crushed them. A similar action followed in 1898 with a United Mine Workers local.
63 Claudia Lewis, Children of the Cumberland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 58.
64 Ibid, 59.31
In the early 1890s, TCI used prison inmates to work the mines. Local miners bitterly
resented prisoners taking their jobs, and an insurrection occurred. The miners freed the
prisoners, burned the stockades, and initiated gunfights with the company guards. Short,
violent strikes occurred almost every year after that for two decades. As coal deposits in
the county were depleted, unions began to subside as well. By 1926 there were none in
the county. 65
When mining opportunities dwindled and the Great Depression took hold, there
were no industrial employment alternatives for the families of Grundy County. Existing
farms were meager because of the thin and sandy soil, though the number of farm
families increased substantially during the depression.66 The county had the highest relief
rate in the state, with seventy-two percent on the relief rolls between November 1933 and
February 1935. Claudia Lewis cites these statistics, “60% of the total population on
relief . . . the net resources of 94.2% of the relief families average less than $500 . . . total
indebtedness of relief families, in per cent of all property, over 50%.” With the poverty
came corresponding issues such as poor health, diet, hygiene, and housing. 67
These real people with real problems were the focus when Highlander Folk
School opened in the impoverished community in November 1932. During the first year,
Highlander founders Myles Horton and Don West focused on establishing their own
cooperative community to sustain the school and began steps for a resident program of
labor training. In September 1933, Highlander sent a report “to Our Friends of
65 Glen, Highlander, 23.
66 Allred, Grundy County, 6.
67 Lewis, Children of the Cumberland, 55.32
Summerfield and neighboring communities,” explaining the function of the school:
“Highlander Folk School is doing three jobs: community work, courses for workers, and
extension,” the latter taking them throughout the mountainous region to provide
educational programs to help people with economic and community development, family
issues, and agriculture. 68
The Wilder Strike
In those first months, an urgent issue presented itself when Myles Horton heard
about the miners’ strike in Wilder. The strike had begun in the summer of 1932 and by
winter, when Horton and West opened the doors at Highlander, the living situation for
their Fentress County neighbors was dire. Horton went to Wilder in late November of a
bitterly cold winter and discovered that the company had shut off the electricity and
removed the doors from the company houses that were occupied by the miners and their
families. The Red Cross was supposed to be helping the miners, but the county Red Cross
chairman was the mine superintendent’s wife; when food was delivered, it went not to the
miners’ families but to the strikebreakers. Horton found starving people. After visiting
the site and arranging for students and teachers from Highlander to support the strikers,
Horton went back to Grundy County and wrote letters to newspapers across the state to
request help for the striking miners and their families. Food and clothing started coming
in to the people who desperately needed help. 69
68 “Letter to Summerfield and neighboring communities,” Madison, Wisconsin, September 1933, Mss 265, Box 1, Folder 3, Highlander Research and Education Center, Wisconsin Historical Society.
69 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 30; and “The First Year’s Work”, Madison, Wisconsin, Spring 1933, Mss 265, Box 1, Folder 3, Highlander Research and Education
33
Miners as well as their employers were hit hard as the Great Depression took hold
in the early 1930s. All three companies in Wilder and the neighboring towns of Davidson
and Crawford were losing money. As workdays were cut back, pay was reduced to the
point that they could not feed their families. In 1930, the workers organized secretly with
the hope that a union would give them a voice to negotiate for some economic relief.
When they had enough members, they petitioned the operators for recognition and
threatened to strike if the owners failed to recognize their union. The Wilder, Davidson,
and Crawford companies were intensely competitive, but they decided to work together
to defeat the union. Their method was to shut down all the mines in the communities until
the workers came back without their union. Two of the mines shut down as agreed, but
the third, Fentress Coal and Coke in Wilder, stayed open, shipping coal with a full staff
and effectively double-crossing the other two companies. In retaliation, the two that were
conned gave the union a one-year contract and reopened under the United Mine Workers
union flag in July 1931. The contract did not provide for a wage increase, but it did
promise not to cut wages.70
Coal companies and miners continued to struggle. The miners’ wages would have
been competitive if they had been able to work five or six days each week, but they were
working only three. Additionally, “take outs” were deducted from their pay for rent, coal
and lights for their houses, fees for the doctor, hospital and bath house, and burial funds,
as well as blasting powder, fuses and other work-related materials the company did not
provide. After these deductions, miners had very little money left for food. The mining
Center, Wisconsin Historical Society.
70 “Wilder-Davidson Collection,” Tennessee Technological University, Archive of Research Materials from Oral History Production, “The Wilder-Davidson Story”, 1987.
34
companies, because of their own dire financial situation, did not consider the needs of the
workers. The companies broke the contract and the miners took two drastic wage cuts
early in 1932. By June, it was clear the companies were going to lowball the contract. In
fact, they announced even more production cuts. Further complicating the situation, Brier
Hill Collieries, a New York-based company and owner of the Crawford and Twinton
mines, shut down permanently, leaving several hundred men out of work. 71
This was the climate when the union proposed a contract renewal with few
changes from the previous year. According to one report, “Throughout this period of the
Union Contract the miners had run an ‘Aid Truck’ because a large number of men were
not earning enough to buy their supplies and feed their families, so that they felt that to
accept the new wage would put them all on a starvation basis.”72 One miner remembered,
“I think I was maybe making 36 cents a ton. Loading a whole ton for 36 cents. It was a
toss-up. You didn’t know if you were going to win or starve to death. You was going to
starve to death with work.”73 Fentress Coal and Coke would not accept union’s proposal,
and offered a contract only if the union took a 20 percent cut in wages and essentially
agreed to be a non-union shop. The union, however, refused to accept the proposal and on
July 9, 1932, the yearlong strike began. Barney Graham, a talented leader for the union
71 W. Lynwood Montell, Untitled Research Paper, “The Wilder-Davidson Story,” Archive of research materials from production, Tennessee Technological University Archives, 1987, 5-7.
72 “Trouble in the Tennessee Coalfields, 2/10/33,” Methodist Church, Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN.
73 Fran Ansley and Brenda Bell, “No Moanin’: Voices of Southern Struggle,” Southern Exposure, no. 304 (Winter 1974): 112-142.
35
although he was a semi-literate mountain man, led the strike. “Nothing the company did
seemed to break the striker’s morale, in part because of Graham,” Horton said. 74
The two parties attempted negotiations, but the mines remained closed until
October 19, when Fentress Coal and Coke announced it would reopen with non-union
labor called “scabs.” The company had a hard time finding miners willing to work, and
eventually brought in miners from Kentucky, upper East Tennessee, and northern
Alabama to work. To protect their imported laborers, the company hired a security force
and armed them with high-powered rifles and automatic shotguns. They evicted twenty-
four union families to make room for the new non-union workers. With guards in place
around the mines, twenty-five “scabs” showed up for work and the violence began.75
During the night of October 19, 1932, the coal tipple, a large, $20,000 machine
used to sort coal grades for railroad cars, went up in flames. A couple of days later, a car
driven by L.L. Shivers, superintendent of the Wilder Mines, was fired upon, wounding
one of his passengers. Fentress Coal and Coke filed an injunction against 104 striking
miners to keep them away from the mines and the non-union laborers. Violent and
destructive acts were frequent in the next eight months.76 During this time, Horton made
several visits to Wilder, and he continued to write letters to newspapers, providing
firsthand details of the incidents and threats to show that opposition to the strikers’ cause
was rampant. Horton was committed to getting the word out, particularly because
74 Adams, Seeds of Fire, 32.
75 Ibid.
76 Fount F. Crabtree, “The Wilder Coal Strike of 1932-33” (Masters Thesis, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1937), 27-29; and Wilder-Davidson Story, The End of an Era Part3, The Strike (Dir. Homer Kemp, Tennessee Tech, WCTE, Tennessee Humanities Council, 1987).
36
newspapers statewide had taken a position in support of the mining companies. Those
newspapers, particularly the Nashville Banner and the Nashville Tennessean, would be a
thorn in Highlander’s side for years to come. 77
Tension in the hollow continued for several months with an occasional shooting,
ambush, dynamite explosion, or robbery until April 29, 1933. Barney Graham, president
of the Wilder union, was killed that night, beaten and the front of the company store by
mine guards Shorty Green and Doc Thompson.78 Horton had been aware of a plot to kill
Graham and remembered, “We told Barney he was going to get killed. I told him who
these people were and that they were brought in to kill him. He knew they were going to
kill him.” 79 Horton had also tried to get ministers involved and even tried to convince the
governor to protect Graham. Horton and Alva Taylor, who had done much to help the
struggling miners, had gone to Governor Hill McAllister and presented all they knew
about the threat to Graham. Horton said professional killers had been sent to execute
Graham, and he had evidence that the same hired guns had been responsible for the
murders of eleven people in an Illinois labor dispute. The governor, however, said he felt
no duty to protect Graham.80
Meanwhile, Horton wrote an article for one of the labor presses predicting
Graham’s death. He named the men who would murder him and sent photographs of the
77 Adams, Seeds of Fire, 33.
78 Crabtree, “The Wilder Coal Strike,” 40.
79 Ansley, “No Moanin”, 129.
80 Thomas Bledsoe, Or We’ll Hang Separately, The Highlander Idea (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), 170.
37
38
“thugs.” Graham was killed a week later.81 Green was arrested after several days and
Thompson was charged nearly a month later. Both went on trial in midsummer for
Graham’s murder. Newspaper accounts of the slaying described Green’s actions as self-
defense, claiming Graham was drunk and belligerent, though the evidence tells a different
story. Graham was shot ten times and was beaten until his head split open. Green and
Thompson were acquitted on the murder charges. 82
Violence intensified for several weeks after Barney Graham’s funeral.83
Remaining union miners were evicted from their rented homes, and two hundred men and
their families who had been jobless and hungry for months were then homeless as well.
Graham’s death effectively ended the strike. After a couple of months, the hollow
became quiet and the coal company, having survived the strike and broken the union,
resumed operations. Strikers left to look for work in other areas. If the miners had any
remaining sense of hope before Graham’s slaying, that hope died with him.84
Horton tried to find work for the miners, persuading the Tennessee Valley
Authority’s leader, Dr. Arthur Morgan, to hire as many as he could on projects in East
Tennessee, where TVA was building the Norris Dam at the time.85 Governor McAllister
made a request to Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins for miners from the Wilder area to
be given preference for jobs on projects at Cove Creek near Elizabethton in upper
81 Horton, The Long Haul, 40.
82 “Another Charged with murdering Barney Graham,” Nashville Tennessean, 20 May 1933, p.1.
83 “Wilder in Terror as Ambushings Continue; Auto Riddles, Stores Looted as Aome Still Strike,” Nashville Tennessean, 27 April 1933, p. 1.
84 Ansley, “No Moanin”, 130.
85 Horton, The Long Haul, 40.
39
western North Carolina and Cumberland Homestead in nearby Crossville. Some found
employment with the federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC). Franklin Roosevelt had been president since January, and
most of these opportunities were available as part of his New Deal legislation.86
The Wilder strike was a watershed for Horton and Highlander. As their first social
action, the strike taught Horton and the staff about the roles of newspapers, public
outreach, networking, public officials, union officials, and industry in labor conflicts.
They also learned it was important to learn firsthand what was actually happening. The
usual channels of information were not always reliable sources for the facts. The need for
educating union members in the basic skills of negotiating and running a union became
apparent after the strike. This was a need Highlander became qualified to meet. After the
strike was over, three union miners from Wilder went to Highlander to train in union
organizing.87
Horton’s participation in the strike also brought publicity to the school, and not all
of it was good. Enemies of unionization accused Highlander of advocating communism.
This kept some of the miners away because they feared Horton and his staff members
were “red.”88 This hurt Highlander’s effectiveness and forced it into a defensive position,
a position it maintained for most of its nearly seventy-five years of existence. From its
beginning, there were powerful people who opposed the school, and a few of them were
86 Crabtree, “The Wilder Coal Strike,” 54.
87 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1996),32; and Frank Adams, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, 1975), 34-35.
88 “Methodist Church Report”.
40
strident in their efforts to shut down the mission of the school, whether it was labor
organizing in the 1930s or integration and civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s.89
The Wilder strike was also Highlander’s first exposure to the extent of human
challenges the people of Appalachia faced. Horton learned from the strike that if
Highlander were to help bring about social change in the South, the school would have to
teach within the experiences of the people who lived there. Highlander’s staff, Horton
concluded, had to understand that there was a difference between what they saw as
people’s problems and what the people themselves saw as their problems. Horton learned
that he must consider their perception, experience, and culture in order to hear them.
“When you help them to respect and learn from their own experience, they can know
more about themselves than you do,” Horton said.90 He also learned that hungry people
do not care about social change. “Our talk about brotherhood and democracy and shared
experiences was irrelevant to people in Grundy County in 1932. . . . Their problems had
to do with how to get some food in their bellies and how to get a doctor,” he said.91
1935-1942 Labor Organization and Education at Highlander
During the first two years, the mission of the school evolved, and by 1935 its
work had come more clearly into focus. The staff worked with the community to
facilitate cultural gatherings and cooperative education and became increasingly active in
local labor causes. They began to recognize the needs of workers must be met for a labor
movement to succeed in the South. In a fundraising letter in early 1935, James
89 Glenn, Highlander, 57-83.
90 Horton, The Long Haul, 70-71.
91 Ibid., 69.
41
Dombrowski, secretary of Highlander, wrote of the school’s mission, “The Highlander
Folk School is giving help to workers and farmers all along the line, in training leaders,
participating in their struggles, providing library facilities to outlying communities, and a
program of community education with broad cultural base for our immediate
neighbors.”92 Because of this clarified mission, Highlander became more involved in the
local labor movement. In strikes that occurred in Grundy County, Knoxville, and
Chattanooga, they stood with strikers on the picket lines, and they provided education
and resources for the strikers.93
Simultaneously the national labor movement was going through shifts due to
changes in industry and New Deal legislation. The American Federation of Labor (AFL),
the largest organized labor organization during the first quarter of the twentieth century,
was experiencing a significant loss in membership due to the evolving economic and
industrial landscape, organized efforts by business leaders to give workers alternatives to
organized labor, and a placid leadership that was unwilling to take any steps to grow the
union. Composed primarily of craft unions, the AFL had a rigid hierarchy and embedded
prejudices against different races and immigrant workers. They were unwilling to expand
into mass productions industries that were comprised primarily of immigrants. During the
previous thirty years of rapid industrialization in the United States, many industries were
untouched by labor unions, particularly in the South. Industrial union leaders such as
92 Dombrowski James, Monteagle, TN, fundraising letter, 9 January 1935, Box 5, Folder 20, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society
93 Aimee Isgrig Horton, The Highlander Folk School: A History of its Major Programs (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971; reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989), 96-97.
42
John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW), and Sidney Hillman of the United
Textile Workers of America (UTWA) lobbied the AFL to organize these workers. They
saw the potential strength of a larger labor movement that could make a national impact
and perhaps have a role in helping to change the dire economic situation brought about
by the Great Depression. They believed if they could grow the unions, they could also
shift some political power in the nation and ultimately they could help shift the social and
economic situation for the workers. 94
AFL president William Green and the organization’s leadership, however, would
not act to organize industrial workers. They were leery of the lack of discipline and
commitment of the unskilled workers, of whom many were immigrants and people of
color. The AFL argued that these workers were uncommitted to the unions, and
ultimately the unions would suffer both in public opinion and in their political power if
they organized them. The AFL was historically conservative in its dealings with business,
and they were extremely leery of being labeled radical or allowing themselves to be
painted with the red communist brush. During the twenties, they had fought long and
hard to keep communists out of their unions.95 Their handling of the Loray Mill workers
strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 was disastrous. The Gastonia strike was, with
Elizabethton, Tennessee, the most violent of a yearlong series of textile strikes.
Unfortunately, the violence did nothing to change the business practices of the Southern
textile manufacturers and simply confirmed their determination to resist any unionism in
94 Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 20-21; and “Interview with Myles Horton Regarding the Highlander Book of Interviews”, transcript, Highlander Collection, New Market, Tennessee, Highlander Research and Education Center, 15-16.
95 Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955, 15.
43
any form, John Salmond declared in Gastonia, 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike,
“Though the work week was generally reduced from sixty to fifty-five hours, conditions
otherwise worsened, as the Great Depression caused further layoffs and the cost-cutting
drives continued unmodified.”96 Still, the AFL refused to embrace the establishment of
industrial unions, a position that came to a head during the 1935 convention. During and
shortly after the convention, proponents of industrial unions met, and first planned to
work as a committee within the AFL but soon splitting and formed the CIO in 1936.
Meetings during and shortly after the convention led to several of the industrial unions
splitting with the AFL and forming the CIO in 1936.97
That tense labor atmosphere played out on a national stage, but it was repeated on
a lesser scale as workers’ frustration grew. One of those actions, a strike of the bugwood
workers of Grundy County in 1933, gave Highlander Folk School its first real acceptance
in the community. When the workers, who provided cutover timber – bugwood – for a
process that distilled alcohol and other wood products, went on strike July 3, they were
being paid half what they had earned on previous jobs. One worker began meetings with
Highlander staff that drew bugwood cutters and those who supported them for
discussions of “the low wages, unfair measuring system, and the exorbitant company
store prices.” The workers did not get the wages or union recognition they sought, but
they maintained their strike well into 1934, when some of the Highlander staff also
participated in strikes in Knoxville.98
96 John A. Salmond, Gastonia, 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 179.
97 Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955, 29.
98 Glen, Highlander, 34.
44
During that year, the staff held classes that supported the cutters’ attempts to start
a cooperative farm, store and laundry, opening the way for Highlander to develop a
community education program. The school promoted cooperatives and applied for two
grants, first in August 1934. In doing this, the school established itself by 1934 as an ally
of organized labor and a welcoming place for local residents to gather. The bugwood
strike also validated Horton’s confidence that workers themselves could recognize their
problems and form unions that could be part of a regional labor movement, and it
provided a foundation for the staff’s later work with labor, farmer and civil rights
groups.99
In addition to working with AFL affiliated unions such as the United Mine
Workers Union (UMW) in Wilder, Highlander began training workers for other AFL
unions such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), American
Federation of Hosiery (AFHW), and the United Textile Workers of America (UTWA). In
the summer of 1934, students representing those unions and several others attended
classes at Highlander. Slowly Highlander began to secure its name in union circles and
admitted an increasing number of students whenever a residence term was offered. This
progress, however, had some bumps along the way that the staff had to navigate. When a
strike was launched in early 1935 at the Richmond Hosiery Mill in the Chattanooga area,
“staff members hoped that their participation . . . would attract a larger number of
Southern American Federation of Labor officials to their 1935 summer session, but the
response was disappointing.”100
99 Ibid., 35-36.
100 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 43; and Myles Horton, “Report on Highlander Folk
45
Highlander’s reputation as a hotbed of radicalism spread rapidly early on, even
within union circles. In a letter to Ray Lowry, president of the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), Highlander staff member Rupert Hampton inquired about a rumor that
AFL president Green had ordered an investigation of Highlander. Lowry confirmed he
had learned of the investigation while in Tennessee. None of the investigators had
contacted him for information at that time, he said, although the ostensible reason for the
inquiry was that Highlander was granted a charter with the AFT without a preliminary
investigation. Interestingly, he also noted in his reply, “So far as I could gather the result
of the investigation was even at that time in the hands of the Governor—a condition
which I am unable to appreciate if it were an AF of L investigation.”101 James
Dombrowski wrote Lowry three days later with a strongly worded letter denying any
communist ties, “Of course the allegation that this is a communist school is absurd. . . .
We have no affiliations of any kind with any economic or political groups other than with
the American Teachers Union. To be sure most of the staff are SP [Socialist Party]
members and one of our number is Labor Secretary for the South of the SP, but it is our
policy to keep the school non-factional in fact and spirit. The major emphasis is upon the
development of intelligent and loyal trade union members.”102
School for 1935,” newsletter, Monteagle, TN, 1935, Box 1, Folder 3, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society, 1-5.
101 Raymond F. Lowry, Chicago, IL, to Rupert Hampton, Highlander, response to inquiry, 26 June 1935, Box 5, Folder 16, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
102James Dombrowski, Monteagle, TN, to Raymond F. Lowry, Chicago, IL, 29 June 1935, Box 5, Folder 16, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
46
Charges of radicalism and communism were only the beginning, however, and on
February 6, 1937, the Chattanooga News published a story claiming Highlander was “a
dangerous and immoral institution.”103 In the original story, Lyle C. Stovall, chairman of
the Americanism committee of the Chattanooga American Legion, was quoted as saying
a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer posing as a reporter found that Highlander was not a
school; rather, it was “an instrument of fomenting class consciousness and teaching strike
techniques.” Stovall claimed his comments had been distorted and misused, but the
following day, the Chattanooga Free Press joined in. Highlander’s response was to call
on labor and other friends of the school to inundate George Fort Milton, editor of the
News, with letters to the editor, which they did. In addition, they created a petition
supporting the faculty for what it had done to help the local residents, and more than four
hundred county residents signed it. When the letters started coming in, Milton refused to
print them and defended his paper’s report, but ultimately he printed the letters and called
on Highlander to call off the drive. Again, Horton believed Highlander’s value to the area
had been affirmed by labor and community support.104
Horton’s conclusion, however, was viewed in a different light in an internal
squabble in 1937. Veteran organizers Elizabeth “Zilla” Hawes and her husband, Franz
Daniel, accused Horton and others at Highlander of caring more about the school than the
labor movement. Hawes and Daniel, strongly aware that the significant infiltration of
communists in the American labor movement was hampering a wider acceptance of
unions, were troubled by Highlander’s open-door policy. In its effort of non-
103 “Mystery Veils Secret Probe of Folk School,” Chattanooga News, February 6, 1937.
104 Glen, Highlander, 53.
47
discrimination, Highlander trained all students who came, regardless of political or
religious ties or race. Although the school itself remained unaffiliated, its philosophy
would not allow it to turn away communist organizers, even if their presence might
ultimately harm labor.105
By that time, Highlander had developed an educational program that included
summer and winter residence courses, year-round extension work, and a community
program of cooperatives and cultural events. About 160 students had attended residence
terms, more than 1650 had been reached through extension classes, and at least 1,000 had
been present during special institutes. The school, between 1937 and 1941, became a
significant part of the southern labor movement.106 It offered programs that drew
hundreds of participants from more than twenty international unions, and the school's
staff continued to take part in organizing drives and strikes.107 In 1937, the school’s
importance was demonstrated when the Textile Workers Organizing Committee
announced an effort to organize the nearly 350,000 workers in Southern textile plants and
enlisted Highlander’s help in the effort. That year the curriculum at Highlander centered
on practical ways to help union members run their organizations, and by 1941, the faculty
had built up a program that provided considerable support to the growth of Southern
industrial unions.108
105 Ibid., 54-55.
106 Ibid., 58.
107 Richard Magat, Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 128-129.
108 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 58.; and James Dombrowski, “Outstanding Achievements in 1940,” newsletter, Monteagle, TN, 1941, Box 1, Folder 4, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin
48
As respect for the school widened among union members, Highlander also made
some inroads in Grundy County, where the continued struggles of working people
sometimes overrode their fears about charges of radicalism and communism. In 1938, the
school focused on unionized WPA workers who had managed to find resolution of a
wage dispute in late 1937, but still faced some discrimination on WPA projects because
they were union members. Horton used this opportunity to expand labor influence by
establishing a nonpartisan labor conference and building a coalition of ten of the eleven
unions in Grundy County. The coalition worked to support “labor’s candidates” in the
fall elections, and those candidates won in the races for sheriff, school superintendent and
three road commissioners. Despite their victories, powerful opponents tried to thwart
them by withholding salaries and stalling on proposals. When the road commissioners
finally secured a union contract with the WPA that allowed them to appoint foremen and
timekeepers, state WPA head Harry Berry, a powerful opponent of the WPA union,
raised the red specter again. In January 1939, the commissioners warned that they would
terminate a major road project unless the WPA complied with the contract. Berry accused
the commissioners of trying “to build roads by the hammer and sickle rather than with the
pick and shovel.” He blamed Horton for the controversy and demanded that the
commissioners resign. When they refused, Berry shut down the project, eliminating the
seven hundred jobs it had provided for men in Grundy County. The road commissioners
tried to negotiate a compromise, but Berry refused 109 In February 1939, the WPA rehired
326 men to work on state highways in Grundy County, leaving most union members
Historical Society, 1-2.
109 James Dombrowski, “WPA Strike of 1939,” Highlander Folk School Collection, box 10, folder 8; and Chattanooga Times, 11, 12, February 1939.
49
without jobs and diminishing the power of the road commissioners and dealing a
significant blow to the previous year’s political victories.110
Even more fodder for Highlander’s opponents came almost concurrently with the
WPA conflict when a film crew produced People of the Cumberland, used Highlander as
its home base, and documented the school and its work. Production of the documentary
film was in the hands of Frontier Films, a company formed in 1937 by a group of leftists
aligned with the Popular Front. In the 1930s, the Popular Front was a movement in
Europe and America that included many communist groups that formed alliances to
oppose the threat of fascism. The film was released in 1938 to critical acclaim and gained
a wide audience. The loose communist association, however, just like the non-
discrimination that allowed communists to attend Highlander programs, stoked the
adversarial fires aimed at destroying the school. Undeterred, Horton continued to forge
alliances with reform groups in the South, the most prominent of which was the Southern
Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), an interracial coalition that called for political,
economic and racial change. When the conference’s first convention was held in
Birmingham, Alabama, in November 1938, among the eleven hundred in attendance were
Highlander representatives Myles and Zilphia Horton and Bill Buttrick, along with First
Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Horton was hopeful that
SCHW could provide a structure for Southern reformers, but it had a militant reputation
and, like Highlander itself at the end of the 1930s, was still plagued by charges of
Communist influence. 111
110 Glen, Highlander, 61.
111 Ibid., 70.
50
While former students and staff had gained prominence in union locals,
Highlander’s opponents continued the campaign to discredit it at every opportunity. It
had repeatedly survived these attacks and it survived a new onslaught launched in
October 1939, when a man who introduced himself as John McDougal arrived at
Highlander, claiming to be a faculty member on leave from Texas Christian University
who was interested in Horton’s school.112 He was, in fact, John McDougal Burns, a
reporter on assignment from the Nashville Tennessean, who wrote a series of six stories
that were published on the paper’s front page, starting October 15, 1939. In the first piece
he wrote that the staff taught “red doctrine” and “communist theories” and that the school
used every opportunity to spread “the leftist doctrine.” The allegations continued through
the series, and Highlander fired back, trying to win public opinion for their side. While
the Tennessean was historically a far more liberal paper than its competitor, the Nashville
Banner, Tennessean publisher Silliman Evans had ordered Burns’ undercover
investigation of Highlander. Highlander staff member Bill Buttrick “suggested that the
Tennessean probe was not only ‘the opening gun’ in a drive to secure southern votes for
Democratic candidate John Nance Garner in the 1940 presidential campaign by
discrediting unions opposed to him, but also part of a ‘nationwide witch-hunt,’ fueled by
wartime hysteria, to smear all labor and progressive organizations.”113
While many petitions and letters favorable to Highlander were sent to the
Tennessean, few were printed, and editors insisted that the series ran not because of
Evans’ friendship with Garner, but because of Highlander’s “ideological partiality for the
112 Ibid., 71.
113 Glen, Highlander, 73.
51
cause of Communism.”114 Even though Highlander drew a lot of public support for its
defense, its powerful adversaries in industry, media and politics roundly exulted in the
series. Just months later, in the spring of 1940, the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC), under the chairmanship of Martin Dies of Texas, announced it “had
received a large amount of material on Highlander in its probe of alleged radical activities
in the South.”115 At least some of the complaints to the Dies Committee came from the
Grundy County Crusaders, a local vigilante group, and FBI agents made frequent visits to
the county asking about blacks and communists.116
The condemnation of Highlander continued on a local level in November 1940
when the Chattanooga News Free-Press reproduced a copy of a check for one hundred
dollars that Eleanor Roosevelt had sent to Highlander with a letter from her personal
secretary noting, “Mrs. Roosevelt asked me to to send you this check which she is very
glad to contribute to the scholarship fund of Highlander Folk School.”117 The paper,
which had nominated the Nashville Tennessean for a Pulitzer Prize for its attack on
Highlander the previous year, said the check showed that Mrs. Roosevelt financed
subversive activities. The bank cashier who released the check said it was an ethical
move because Highlander was “against the government” and its affairs were a matter of
public interest.118 Backing all of this up, also in November 1940, was Joseph M. Kamp’s
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Magat, Unlikely Partners, 128-129.
117 “Mrs. Roosevelt Sends $100 to ‘Folk’ School,” Chattanooga Times, 4 August, 1940, 1.
118 Glen, Highlander, 75.
52
pamphlet, “The Fifth Column in the South,” with Mrs. Roosevelt’s check reprinted on the
inside front cover and quoting liberally from the Tennessean articles.119
These attacks galvanized both supporters and opponents, and the Grundy County
Crusaders renewed efforts to force Highlander to leave the county. At mass meetings and
at smaller ones, the two groups confronted each other and there was little agreement
between them. Highlander, however, remained in Grundy County, more union leaders
appeared to teach courses at the school, and on February 1, 1941, Mrs. Roosevelt
renewed her contribution to Highlander. “By the end of March 1941 the Crusaders faced
almost total defeat. . . . By the time the Tennessee State Industrial Union Council
reaffirmed its support for Highlander in June 1941, Horton was fairly certain that the
attacks on the school had finally subsided.” They had gone on for nearly a decade, and
the goal to shut down Highlander had not been accomplished. John E. Edgerton died in
1938, but James Stahlman would be at the Nashville Banner for three more decades, and
adversaries in both the state and federal government were just getting started.120
119 Joseph P. Kamp, The Fifth Column in the South (New Fairfield, CT: Constitutional Educational League, Inc., 1940, and Knoxville, TN: Conservative Citizens Committee, 1967).
120 Ibid., 79.
CHAPTER IV: ADVERSARIES OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL
Myles Horton grew up in rural Tennessee, and he knew firsthand that there was a
divide between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless. He also believed
that education could reduce the breadth of the economic, social, and racial inequality that
divided those groups in the American South. Horton’s was not a popular belief, and it
was inevitable that he would clash with those who thought it was not only acceptable for
business and industrial leaders to maintain the status quo but obligatory. One of the most
powerful and most persistent was John E. Edgerton, whose Lebanon Woolen Mills drew
Horton’s attention while he was still an undergraduate. The press across the state proved
to be a frequent opponent, particularly James Stahlman, publisher of the strongly
conservative Nashville Banner, George Fort Milton, of the similarly positioned
Chattanooga News, and even the publisher of the Nashville Tennessean, historically just
as liberal as the competing Banner was conservative. Joining the chorus of opposition
were also the Grundy County Crusaders, a group with the sole stated purpose of
“carrying on a crusade against all un-American activities and subversive influence that
may exist in our County” and the head of the Tennessee Works Progress
Administration.121 Given voice through all of them was yet another adversary, the “Red
Scare,” which targeted Highlander from the day the doors of the school opened in 1932
1211 Grundy County Crusaders. 13 October 1934, Box 33, Folder 4, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
53
54
with the aim of teaching poor people to make decisions that could improve their lives. To
accomplish that, the social and economic order would have to change, and the
establishment opposed it with fervor.
A year before the crash of 1929, Edgerton said, “Our industrial and economic
structures have been built through the one hundred and forty years of our national
existence upon the moral and political foundations laid by the clean and capable hands of
our fathers.”122 Edgerton failed to address the fact that many of those “clean” hands had
upheld the worst abuses of slavery and sharecropping to maintain the South’s agrarian
economy. Rather, he declared, “It is not surprising, therefore, that the moral and spiritual
ideals fashioned and set up by our foregathers have been crumbling under increasing
pressures of inflowing alien influences, and that under the same pressures we have been
receding from the political standards and philosophies of the creators of our
unprecedented type of political architecture.”123 He laid much of the blame squarely on
the shoulders of those who called for better conditions for workers. In 1927, forty-one
Southern clergymen had called on NAM to “take the initiative . . . in building good-will
and cooperation [with] higher wages, shorter hours, labor representation and the
absorption of the mill village by the larger community.”124 In his reply, Edgerton said the
average preacher, teacher and social worker knew little about economic law, just as he
knew little about spiritual law. His own shortcoming, however, did not appear to impede
122 John E. Edgerton, Annual address of John E. Edgerton : Delivered at Annual Dinner Held Jointly by the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Industrial Council (New York: National Association of Manufacturers, 1928), 3.
123 Ibid.
124 Industry Replies to Church Appeal. New York Times 1857-Current; 18 April 1927; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003) 15.
55
his interpretation of spiritual teachings. Claiming “industry has advanced farther in
America than politics, religion, morals and education,” Edgerton pointed out that the
wage standards the ministers supported “are not now, never have been, nor ever can be
determined by the necessities of man, nor by moral requirements. Christ Himself did not
determine rewards that way, and men cannot do it.” In short, the philosophical conviction
and social progress that Myles Horton wanted to bring to Tennessee mountain families
was already the target of Edgerton’s contempt long before the idea of Highlander became
a reality. 125
After graduating from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, Horton’s
own education continued at Union Theological Seminary in New York and at the
University of Chicago. “I wanted to learn all the things I could and test them against my
beliefs and figure out if they would be useful when I went back to Tennessee,” he wrote
in his autobiography, The Long Haul. The path to that knowledge was not a direct one,
and he moved through readings in theology, sociology, economics, politics, and
education and examined what they had to say about solving human problems. He
attended religious services of Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. He listened to political
speeches of Communists, anarchists, and socialists, and he went to union halls and rallies
for striking workers.126 He learned from all of them. “You don’t have to know the
answers. The answers come from the people, and when they don’t have any answers, then
you have another role, and you find resources.”127 The discussions among parents of his
125 Ibid.
126 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 36.
127 Ibid., 23.
56
vacation Bible school students in Ozone had proved that, his explorations outside the
South reinforced it, and he fully intended to use that belief as a significant block in the
philosophical foundation of his Southern Mountain School. It was a radical idea that was
coming to fruition as the depression deepened, and people were in increasingly desperate
straits.128
That national economic desperation in the early 1930s provided an open
opportunity for radical ideas, but it was preceded by a business-friendly decade. In the
South throughout the 1920s, the code word for business was “progressive.” That usage,
however, is distinct from the political usage used in the Progressive Party of Senator
Robert LaFollette or the progressive thought of Myles Horton. When businessmen used
the word “progressive,” it “carried the meaning of efficiency and development rather than
reform,” according to George B. Tindall in The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945.
It was an age of business working to grow and government supporting its growth through
infrastructure. It was a boom time for the industrial South primarily because of cheap
labor, lower business costs, and minimal union activity, yet business believed in a clearly
delineated assignment of responsibility between the general population, government, and
themselves. In that view, it was not the responsibility of business to cure the South’s
economic problems such as hunger, deplorable conditions for factory workers, or farm
tenant problems. Many business leaders believed economic activity, with help from the
church and charitable organizations, would eventually take care of these problems. These
128 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 11-12.
57
attitudes matched the attitudes of much of the rest of the country at the time. Business
was king during the 1920s.129
One significant sign of the rise of Southern industry nationally was the 1921
election of John E. Edgerton to the post of president of the National Association of
Manufacturers, making him the chief spokesman for the national business community. In
1914, after his brother died, he took over the Lebanon Woolen Mills, which produced
blankets, and he soon became president of the Tennessee Manufacturers Association and
subsequently became active in NAM. While little is known about Edgerton’s parents,
who lived in North Carolina when he was born in 1879, it can be assumed that they had
sufficient means. The 1880 census records show his father was a farmer and owned
property valued at $3000.130 His brother, who preceded him as head of the mill, was a
physician, and Edgerton himself was a graduate of Vanderbilt University and later served
on its board of directors along with Banner publisher James Stahlman, another anti-labor
Highlander adversary. The opportunities that came to the two Edgerton brothers were
then rarely available outside the middle and upper classes. 131
Further evidence of his family’s means can be gleaned from his mother’s obituary
in 1904, which listed, in addition to Dr. Howard Edgerton, the physician and John E.
Edgerton, a graduate student, others sons that included a lawyer, a financier and two
merchants, as well as a daughter at Louisburg Female College in Louisburg, North
129George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 319.
130 North Carolina, 1880 Federal Population Census (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1880), 522.
131 “The Death of Gabriel Griffon Edgerton,” The Smithfield Herald, 23 September 1897.
58
Carolina.132 Whatever his background, Edgerton, in the 1920s and ‘30s, had secured a
place in the leadership in business and government that wielded significant power in the
nation. In the South, with its agrarian heritage, many of these men – and they were all
men – had come from generations of paternalistic landowners whose control over
workers moved from slaves to sharecroppers. Though industrialism came to the South
later than it did in the rest of the country, the leaders were soon doubly stunned by the
Depression and by their untimely role as defenders of the old order.133
In contrast, Myles Horton and Don West, farm boys from Tennessee and Georgia
respectively, were fixed firmly in their position as opponents of that order. The two
young men, recent college graduates, had neither money nor property nor status to lose,
but they believed they had a great deal to give when they brought their ideas for social
change to the people of the Cumberland Plateau. While they were idealistic, they also
knew that their ideas would be perceived as radical and that change would not come
quickly. Horton had already had a strong hint of that while he was still at student at
Cumberland University in 1927, when Edgerton gave a speech to the student body about
labor that Horton found paternalistic and demeaning to workers. In Horton’s
autobiography, he recalls Edgerton saying, “When we, the manufacturers, in our
judgment see fit to pay people more, or change conditions, we will. But we won’t tolerate
interference from the workers, because we give them their livelihood, they owe
everything they have to us.”134 Horton responded to the statement with outrage, and later
132 “A Mother of Israel Gone Home,” The Smithfield Herald. 20 March 1903.
133 David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 180-181.
134 Horton, The Long Haul, 25.
59
claimed that hearing Edgerton’s speech was one of the most radicalizing experiences in
his life. Edgerton was forty-eight and Horton was twenty. Edgerton, who had been
brought up in a different class and ultimately a different South than Horton, was firmly
entrenched in the social and political order of the South. The exposure to Edgerton and
his paternalistic attitudes widened Horton’s focus. He then understood the role of
organized unions; they would give voice to workers who had no voice.135
Edgerton, however, was a product of his time. After the death of his father, he
moved to Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1896 to join his older brother, Dr. Howard K.
Edgerton. 136 He finished high school at Cumberland University’s prep school and
attended Cumberland his freshman year of college. He began his studies at Vanderbilt
after receiving the Cartmell scholarship, a coveted award given to a Wilson County
resident. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1902 and a master’s in 1903. Edgerton was
involved in a variety of activities at Vanderbilt. He was captain of the football team,
which in 1901 won the championship of the South, ran track for five years, was a
member of the student Honor Committee, president of the YMCA, vice-president of his
class, and valedictorian of his class in 1902. He was also unanimously elected Bachelor
of Ugliness, “a degree indicating the most popular man in the university.”137
Teaching was his first vocation. He taught at Castle Heights Military Academy in
Lebanon for one year, followed by one year at Memphis University School. In 1905, he
became co-founder, with Colonel J.P. Hardy, of Columbia Military Academy in
135 Ibid.
136 “The Death of Gabriel Griffon Edgerton”.
137 Frederic W. Keough, “The New Officers,” American Industries 22.2 (June 1921): 39.
60
Columbia, Tennessee. Dr. Howard Edgerton ran a small hospital in Lebanon. He opened
the woolen mill in 1909 to make blankets for hospitals. In 1912, he invited John to join
the mill as vice-president.138 When Howard Edgerton died two years later, John took over
the mill, and quickly showed his ambition when he decided to run for Tennessee state
senate in 1914 against a political veteran from Wilson County, Walter Cartmell. Both
men ran on the Democratic ticket. Though Edgerton lost, it was a close race. Cartmell
won with 1,968 votes and Edgerton had 1,670, just a 298-vote margin.139
Not allowing himself to be dejected by his political defeat, Edgerton became
involved in state industrial politics and was elected president of the Tennessee
Manufacturing Association in 1915. With his election to the state organization, Edgerton
represented Tennessee in the National Association of Manufacturers and was elected
director-at-large in 1916. The following year he was invited to give a speech to a joint
session of the Tennessee General Assembly to address industry and lawmaking. This
March 7, 1917, speech is the first of many that he gave that appeared in the National
Association of Manufacturers’ official publication, American Industries. Calling
manufacturers “the very backbone of our industrial organism,” he presented the
lawmakers with his thoughts on lawmaking and manufacturing in Tennessee:
The manufacturer is pictured as a white livered scoundrel preying upon his helpless employees and as a general menace to the public welfare. Every bullet-headed and shriveled-souled politician holds him up to the public scorn as a heartless extorter and oppressor of the poor. He is anathematized by many clubs and organizations that are exceedingly anxious to help the poor if somebody else will pay the cost. Few there be who dare to publicly defend him lest it endanger political ambitions. It is
138 “Established in 1909 and employs 75 People,” The Lebanon Democrat, 12 February 1914, 5.
139 “Unofficial County Returns,” The Lebanon Democrat, 8 November 1914, 1.
61
seldom indeed that a legislative voice is raised on his behalf, and I have never heard it admitted or intimated publicly by a politician that he is entitled to respectable consideration. . . . We have been waiting for many years for just one piece of constructive legislation designed primarily to stimulate and encourage the manufacturing industry in our state, or a piece that calls attention to the fact that the employee interest has some obligation and not all rights. While some other states are passing laws to protect invested capital and to attract foreign capital, we have been busy emphasizing biennially the iniquities of capital.140
In the same speech he noted his thoughts on organized labor, which he opposed,
and he introduced the “open shop” concept, which he enthusiastically promoted. “Every
person has a right to work and to quit work only when he wants to. We do not deny the
right of any class to organize for worthy ends, but we do emphatically deny that any
organization has the right to use coercive means to increase its power or to use its power
to enforce unwilling obedience to unjustifiable or lawless mandates.” He suggested that
strikes were “instruments of the devil,” and that the cost of living was high because of
“too few people at profitable work and too many living at the expense of the few.” 141 He
concluded the speech with a theme that ran throughout his speeches, that idleness and
lack of hard work is the culprit for most economic problems, and that the right to work is
sacred – as long as it is a right exercised apart from any labor union negotiation. He
blamed the high cost of living at the time on the fact that “simply too few people at
profitable work and too many living at the expense of the few.”142
The state manufacturing associations were affiliated with each other through the
National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which began with a small group of
business leaders representing ship builders and machine tool industries. One of the oldest
140 “Industry and Law-making,” American Industries, April 1917, 21-22.
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid.
62
and best known of the national business-related organizations, NAM still exists today and
provides a lobbying effort on behalf of manufacturers. Initially NAM’s goal was to
facilitate the export trade. The country was in a deep recession in the mid-1890s, and
business leaders wanted to search for new markets outside the United States. They
created an association to encourage the manufacturing sector throughout the country to
work with one accord to facilitate the goal of expanding their markets. Launched in
Cincinnati in 1895, NAM focused on trade for its first eight years.143 The original
objectives of the organization were “1) Retention and supply of home markets with U.S.
products and extension of foreign trade; 2) Development of reciprocal trade relations
between the U.S. and foreign governments; 3) Rehabilitation of the U.S. Merchant
Marine; 4) Construction of a canal in Central America; and 5) Improvement and
extension of U.S. waterways.”144
During its first half century, NAM was governed by a board of directors that
consisted of not more than thirty members, including the president, treasurer, and vice
president from each of the fifteen states having the largest membership in the association,
and six directors-at-large. John Edgerton became a director-at-large in 1916. All positions
were unpaid, including the position of president. Annual dues were $100 per year in
1926, up from $50 in 1923.145 There were four departments in NAM in 1926: trade, law,
publicity and industrial relations. The trade department was responsible for lobbying for
143 John Nellis Stalker, Jr., “The National Association of Manufacturers: A Study in Ideology” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1950), 3-5.
144 “NAM Historical Highlights,” National Association of Manufacturers, Organization, available at www.nam.org (22 December 2005).
145 Albion Guildford Taylor, “Labor Policies of the National Association of Manufacturers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1927), 20-21.
63
manufacturers’ interests pertaining to foreign trade. The law department was in
Washington D.C. and concentrated on the lobbying efforts of the organization. The
publicity department was responsible for promoting the ideals of the organization. The
industrial relations department, formerly the Open Shop Department, kept its attention on
the relationship between employer and employee.146
Strong opposition to labor became a primary focus when a group of prominent
anti-union men took over the organization in 1903. NAM became a “an anti-union
organization.”147 These businessmen were responding to the national rise of men like
Socialist Eugene Debs, a political and labor activist; the Progressive Party; and labor
union movements, which had gained some momentum around the turn of the century.
David M. Parry, who led NAM for five years beginning in 1903, described his view of
unions: “Organized labor knows but one law and that is the law of physical force—the
law of the Huns and Vandals, the law of the savage.”148
At the core of the conflict between the views of organized labor and the views of
NAM were property rights. Manufacturers believed their rights as employers came from
their ownership of the business and all work related to that business. Workers entered
into a work agreement with the owners, thus giving the owners complete charge of their
property. The worker was himself a property that was hired out. Labor, in contrast,
believed the right to enter into an employer–employee relationship was not about
property rights because human beings were not commodities.149
146 Ibid., 22-23.
147Stalker, “The National Association of Manufacturers,” 5.
148 Taylor, “Labor Policies of the National Association of Manufacturers,” 35.
149 Ibid., 52.
64
An analysis of NAM’s relationship with labor came in 1927 in a book by Albion
Taylor, who found there were five methods employed by the association to diminish
labor: “propaganda through the school, the church, the state, and industry; endorsements
and condemnations of political candidates and party platforms; legislative activities
including the lobby; humanitarianism, as exemplified in protection from accidents,
workmen’s compensation insurance, and vocational education; and advocacy of certain
systems of employee representation and stock ownership.”150 Edgerton employed these
methods both while he was president of NAM and later while president of the Southern
States Industrial Council. In fact, he used some of the methods in his campaign against
Highlander. Taylor concluded in his dissertation that NAM was more successful in
lobbying legislation than in any of the other attempts to influence the public, noting that
NAM achieved “most through its political activities.”151
John Stalker noted in his dissertation on NAM that the leadership of the
organization was aware of class issues in their businesses. He cited the class ideas of
W.P. White, a member of NAM who in 1919 completed a NAM questionnaire about
employees and unionism. White acknowledged class as a factor in the organization of the
workplace generally, and in companies specifically. Stalker attached importance to
White’s explanation:
This analysis is important in several respects. First, and most obvious is White’s frank espousal of functional class arrangements in society. Given the existence of such classes, his second point that each class is necessary to society and have their status to maintain, assumes a static condition or relation between classes. This was further reinforced by his pronouncement that the ideal relationship in society was one in which the
150 Ibid., 167-168.
151 Ibid., 171.
65
individual performs his appointed tasks most efficiently within his class. In that way each class fulfills its function to the whole social organism. Furthermore, White was willing to concede that opportunity differed with each class, thus an unskilled laborer would have less opportunity, or at least different opportunities than a manufacturer by reason of his individual ability, but also because of his class or status in society. In no case did White mention the possibility of fluidity between classes. Here then is a 20th Century industrial feudalism.152
Though it is impossible to confirm that others in NAM believed this in 1919 or later, this
class awareness by a member of the organization in this period is significant. Edgerton
himself did not espouse any class ideas, though one can argue that his actions toward
Horton and Highlander reflected a belief that the social order should not be upset.153
NAM’s leadership promoted another practice that Stalker addressed as well. In a
1922 Committee for Industrial Betterment, there was a discussion of putting employee
representatives on boards of directors. The committee opposed the plan because members
believed the employee would be unqualified and would hold biased opinions contrary to
the position he was charged to represent. “The assumption is that so long as his material
wants are looked after, his physical surrounding pleasant, he would be content to follow
the leadership and guidance of his natural superiors—management.” This is exactly the
kind of attitude that Myles Horton observed firsthand when he heard John E. Edgerton
speak at Cumberland University in 1927. 154
The anti-union sentiment continued during Edgerton’s years at the helm of NAM.
For example, he declared in a speech in 1926, “It is time for America to awake from its
dream that an eternal holiday is a natural fruit of material prosperity, and to reaffirm its
152 Stalker, “The National Association of Manufacturers,” 101.
153 Ibid.
154 Ibid., 102.
66
devotion to those principles and laws of life to the conformity with which we owe all of
national greatness. I am for everything that will make work happier but against
everything that will further subordinate its importance in the program of life.”155
This also illustrates how Edgerton linked his ideas about business to religion, a
pattern he followed throughout his life. One example of the pattern began in 1916, when
he started a daily chapel service for employees at his woolen mill.156 The service began
each workday and the practice continued into the 1950s, nearly twenty years after his
death. He credited the mill’s success to this ritual. In 1921 he was elected president of the
National Association of Manufacturers. In his acceptance speech he illustrated his
combined religious and business ideals with his choice of language: “I believe in the
Manufacturers’ Association of America; I believe in its ideals; I believe in its
potentialities; I believe there is no organization in America that holds within its grasp
such possibilities for real constructive service, not only to industry but to this great nation
of ours. . . . I believe in its unselfish ideals. I am therefore glad to accept service because I
interpret the honor that has come to me as only another and a larger opportunity for
service – service to my fellow members and to my country. . . . I shall preach the gospel
of cooperation among manufacturers.”157
Edgerton served in this role for ten years, re-elected annually until 1931 when he
resigned and became chairman of the board. He held the chairmanship until 1933.
155 Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, “The End of Shorter Hours,” Labor History, (Summer 1984): 373-404.
156 “John E. Edgerton obituary,” The Vanderbilt Alumnus, (October 1938): 13.
157 “Salutory Address of the New President Mr. John E. Edgerton, of Tennessee,” American Industries, (June 1921): 23.
67
According to Stalker, one of the methods NAM used to combat strikes was to encourage
manufacturers to move into areas resistant to unionization. He believes Edgerton was
“responsible for the official interest in the possibilities of industry in the South. But even
this area might not remain free from the taint of unionism, and thus would lose one of its
greatest attractions.” This observation could help explain Edgerton’s intense reaction to
unions generally and Highlander’s labor education focus specifically.158
Interestingly, the growth surges in NAM parallel the growth of the AFL, thus
reflecting the appeal of the organization as an anti-union force. There were membership
surges in 1903 and 1904 and again after World War I, with notable steady declines
beginning in 1923 through the depression. 159 Stalker explained that NAM was made up
of small manufacturing businesses until 1932 when the “Brass Hats” took over the
organization. The brass hats were Charles R. Hook, Robert L. Lund, Robert B.
Henderson, H.L. Ferguson, John L. Lovett, and Tom Girdler. These men reorganized the
organization and actively solicited the support of big business. “Their efforts were soon
rewarded by the active support of some 207 large corporations, who since 1933 have
dominated the organization financially and politically.” Under their leadership, the
organization moderated its message and sought to work with labor and government.160
Based on Edgerton’s speeches and writings in the decade leading up to the
changes urged by the Brass Hats, he surely believed that group’s effort to bring about a
stronger relationship with both labor and government was far too radical. At the same
158Stalker, “The National Association of Manufacturers,” 82.
159 Taylor, “Labor Policies of the National Association of Manufacturers,” 19.
160 Stalker, “The National Association of Manufacturers,” 4.
68
time, the newly implemented National Recovery Act (NRA) designed to help workers
was another potential threat to the power of the manufacturers and business owners. The
Tennessee Manufacturers Association responded quickly, gathering in December 1933 in
Chattanooga and drawing two hundred manufacturers from thirteen Southern states to
discuss their plight under the NRA. Edgerton presided over the meeting, and the
gathering adopted a resolution that asserted the “view that the differential in wages
between the North and the South should be based upon the wages which prevailed in the
two sections in July 1929.”161
The resolution was not surprising, since Edgerton had, in his 1930 presidential
address to NAM, expounded on his ideas about who was in charge of the manufacturing
process. In his view, the power lay with “those whose vision and money and skill are
providing [the workers] with such opportunities. The function of labor unions in that
process, he said, was “meddling . . . motivated more by profit for the meddlers than
helpfulness to those upon which they obtrude their service.”162
In his address, Edgerton declared the real responsibility for the poverty of the
depression lay with the jobless themselves. “If they do not . . . practice the habits of thrift
and conservation, or if they gamble away their savings in the stock market or elsewhere,
is our economic system, or government, or industry to blame?”163 Edgerton and other
business leaders offered all kinds of wisdom about the cause and cure of the Great
161 Tennessee Manufacturer’s Association, “Tennessee Manufacturer’s Association Bulletin,” bulletin, Nashville, TN, 26 December 1933, Box 11, Folder 10, MSS 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society
162 John E. Edgerton, A labor policy for the South : An Address / by John E. Edgerton before the Institute of Public Affairs (New York: National Association of Manufacturers, 1930), 5.
69
Depression. They explained the nation had gone through depressions before, and that
downturns were a part of the normal business cycle. Therefore, they argued, leave the
economy alone to heal. It did not, of course, and by 1932, the business community was at
a loss for a way to deal effectively with the depression, but that did not stop Edgerton
from trying. After he stepped down from the NAM presidency in 1932, he was
instrumental in the birth two years later of an organization called the Southern States
Industrial Council (SSIC). According to Horton, this organization was much more
conservative than NAM, which, by 1932, ushered along by the Brass Hats, had become
more flexible in its attitude toward workers and working conditions because of the tough
years of the depression. According to Horton, however, Edgerton believed NAM, under
its new leadership, was communistic.164
While Edgerton was trying to build a base of Southern manufacturers who would
stand their ground against unionization, many industrialists in the North were no longer
seeing unions as the enemy, but as partners in production. According to historian Arthur
Schlesinger, “By 1932 the American business community—or, at least, powerful
elements in it—was moving fast toward ideas of central economic planning. The nation,
said Vermonter Ralph E. Flanders of the Jones and Lamson Machine Company, was
approaching a new stage in human development – “the self-conscious direction of the
mechanism of economic and social life to ends of general well-being.”165 The new
163 William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 21.
164 Ibid., 24.
165 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957; reprint, New York: Mariner Books, 2003), 183.
70
partnership with unions and the willingness to change the business rules rankled the old
school Southern industrialists, who had worked hard to keep unions out and keep their
labor cost low. Their attitude would never change. Race and immigration issues ran
beneath the anti-unionism of the Southern ruling class. According to Tindall, “By
offering sanctuary to the impoverished whites of the farms and mountain coves, the story
went, they had brought salvation to the purest stock of native Americans . . . good sturdy
Anglo-Saxon stock.”166
Protecting the Anglo-Saxon heritage was surely on John E. Edgerton’s mind when
he joined in the formation of the Southern States Industrial Council to fight the New Deal
and the changes the members feared were coming with it to the South. Tindall, discussing
Edgerton and the formation of SSIC, observed, “John E. Edgerton took the lead in
founding the Southern States Industrial Council ‘to protect the South against
discrimination’ – that is, against higher wages. The SSIC, formed in December 1933,
was ‘a child of the N.R.A.,’ Edgerton told a senate committee . . . Low pay, he said
elsewhere, would preserve labor’s racial purity, that is foreign labor will not be attracted
to the Southland.” 167 Three primary problems Southern state manufacturers faced when
the NRA was established were: 1) unsatisfactory price structure; 2) an urgent need for a
wage differential based on cost of living; and 3) adjustment of the railroad freight
differentials. They were afraid they would lose their advantage of low wages and low
166 George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University and the Littlefield Fund for Southern History, 1967), 223.
167 Ibid., 444.
71
manufacturing costs if NRA regulations leveled the playing field too much with their
competitors in other regions.168
Edgerton and other industrialists, all of whom were facing difficulties in the
depression, were aware that their main edge over their northern counterparts was cheap
labor. The coming of the unions threatened not only their power in their paternalistic
relationship to the workers, but also their economic interests. In the Southern
industrialists’ defense, this was not a contest between good and bad. Their profits
margins were small, affected by the overall downturn in the economy; they obviously
wanted to save their industries and, therefore, the labor opportunities for workers.169
Edgerton had business reasons for fighting the NRA, but he also had strong
personal beliefs, primarily coming out of a conservative Protestant faith, that the South
needed to maintain its racial purity. There is enough initial evidence to raise suspicion
that purity of race had a great deal to do with Edgerton’s break with NAM and the
beginning of SSIC. In a statement to the Atlanta Georgian after the creation of SSIC,
Edgerton commented, “The South is a homogenous section in which the Anglo-Saxon
blood predominates in overwhelming percentage. It is a section not only one in blood but
of one God and of one fundamental philosophy of life. It looks with disfavor upon
intervention that bears the stamp of influence alien to its conception of true
democracy.”170 In 1934 he raised the fear of “alien invasion.” Concerned that low wages
168 Southern States Industrial Council, Nashville, Tennessee, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Volume 14.
169 Gavin Wright, “Cheap Labor and Southern Textiles, 1880-1930,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 96.4 (November 1981): 605-629.
170 Ibid.
72
would cause a large influx of immigrants into the South, he said, “We will have to speak
in seven or eight languages and accustom ourselves to alien standards, customs, and
philosophies.”171
During the late twenties and early thirties, Edgerton was reactive, as his public
comments reflect. He had significant influence with business and state government
leaders alike, and he used that power to preserve his company and personal agendas.
When Myles Horton first heard Edgerton speak at Cumberland University in 1928, his
comments made Horton so angry he went out to Lebanon Woolen Mills and spoke to the
employees coming out of the plant. He explained to them that they had the right to be in a
union. Word quickly got back to Edgerton, who sat on the board of the university, and
Horton was threatened with expulsion from school. For Edgerton, it did not end there.
Seven years later, in 1935, Edgerton was still exercising his power to stop Horton. One of
the Highlander projects at the time was to help the small Tennessee town of Summerfield
start a cooperative cannery. The goal was to create more canned goods for the needy
people of the town. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration approved a grant for
$7,000, but before the grant could be distributed, the Tennessee Emergency Relief
Administration retracted it. The state was responsible for distributing the federal money
and none other than John Edgerton had launched a protest against the grant because of its
association with Highlander and Horton.172 A year earlier, in January 1934, the group had
applied for a $19,600 grant from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).
171 Ibid.
172 Aimee Isgrig Horton, The Highlander Folk School: A History of its Major Programs (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1971; reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989), 55.
73
In vetoing it, Col. Walter L. Simpson, director of the Tennessee Emergency Relief
Administration (TERA), said “he believed that Highlander was ‘communistic and
anarchistic.’”173 The Chattanooga Times attributed the veto to official reaction to the
school’s radicalism, a position in keeping with increasing negative press against
Highlander statewide. In his study of media coverage of Highlander, Frank Durham
wrote, “In 1934 . . . Edgerton . . . had reviled Highlander publicly as an abominable threat
to ‘the Anglo-Saxon South’.” In late March 1935, the Knoxville Journal and the
Chattanooga Times had charged Highlander with communism based on papers found in
the possession of Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) organizer Ward H. Rogers. 174
During a revival in June 1935, evangelist Billy Sunday began a series of well-reported
attacks on Highlander charging the school with communism. The Chattanooga Times and
Chattanooga News gave nine days’ coverage to Sunday’s allegations. Yet, the problem
was not one of misunderstanding. Rather, newspaper editors, business leaders, and clergy
saw a tremendous threat in Highlander’s challenge to the social order, where they had
long held a position that allowed them to arbitrate social norms. As such, these events
foreshadowed the coming struggle by Tennessee’s business leaders to maintain their
power.175
173 Frank Dallas Durham, “Opposition in Process: The Press. Highlander Folk School and Radical Social Change, 1932-1961” (Ph.D. Diss. Mass Media, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1993), 52.
174 Frank Dallas Durham, “Opposition in process: The Press. Highlander Folk School and Radical Social Change, 1932-1961” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1993), 52; “Legion Vastly Troubled with Carmine Hues,” Chattanooga News, 13 July 1935; and “Soviet Effort Meets Attack at Monteagle,” Chattanooga Times, 13 July 1935.
175 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 40.
74
Edgerton had many friends in high places. He was on the board of trustees of
Vanderbilt University and was instrumental at getting Alva Taylor, the Social Gospel
proponent in its divinity school, fired in 1936. Taylor had publicly lobbied for many labor
causes, even encouraging a union at the woolen mill. When it was time for cuts at the
divinity school, James H. Kirkland, the university president, put the vote before the
board. Kirkland himself was ambivalent about Taylor. Taylor was a good fundraiser and
he did not want to lose that, but the social activism bothered him. Edgerton, however,
wanted him dismissed, and he had a powerful ally on the board in James Stahlman, the
publisher of the conservative Nashville Banner. According to Paul Conkin in Gone with
the Ivy, “Taylor had directly involved himself in a labor dispute at the Banner and stood
for everything that Stahlman bitterly opposed.” In the end, most of the board followed
Kirkland’s lead and Taylor was released.176
Many other leaders throughout the South marched to the same tune as Edgerton,
men such as James Stahlman, and his grandfather, Major Edward Bushrod Stahlman.
Ralph McGill, the longtime editor of the Atlanta Constitution, in his book The South and
the Southerner, recalls his days as a young reporter under the elder Stahlman at the
Nashville Banner:
When he died in August 1930, Major Stahlman had been owner and publisher of the Banner since 1885. In all those years the paper mirrored not so much the news as it did his personality and convictions. Always on the attack, he gloated in victory and never asked quarter or whined in defeat. Politics was his passion, but he was always an independent, never affiliated with a party or faction, but fierce in his support of a candidate.
176 Paul K. Conkin, Gone with the Ivy, a Biography of Vanderbilt University (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 374.
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He was ruthless and merciless in his opposition. Both affection and distaste for him were intense.177
Men like the Stahlmans and Edgerton had strong beliefs and instincts to protect
their status and their lifestyle. If they perceived there was a threat, they fought it –
cloaking their opposition in virtue. Edgerton, for example, in his role as president of the
Tennessee Manufacturers Association, was invited to speak at Highlander in June 1934 to
discuss the organization’s views on labor issues. Edgerton, declining the invitation, and
Horton, in his response, were scornful of one another, but Edgerton clearly demonstrated
a feeling of superiority. “Frankly and kindly,” Edgerton wrote, “I feel that the time that
God has given me can be more righteously and helpfully expended in trying to preserve
and multiply the opportunities for employment which already exist and, in trying to lift
the levels of economic and spiritual life in our own nation even higher above that obtain
in such nations as Russia and Denmark.”178 Edgerton was even more disapproving when
he spoke of the invitation from Highlander in the bulletin of the Tennessee Manufacturers
Association.
Let it be known that this school, which appears to have been recently established at Monteagle, has on its advisory committee such men as the following: Norman Thomas, Arthur Swift, Reinhold Neibuhr, W.W. Alexander, Sherwood Eddy, Alva Taylor, Joseph K. Hart, William Spofford, and Kirby Page. Assisting Mr. Horton in operating the school is a Mr. Dombrowski, who is armed with Russian posters collected during a recent visit, Miss Hawes, organizer for Amalgamated Clothing Workers in East Tennessee, and two or three others. The purposes set forth for this great educational institution are as follows: ‘To train rural and industrial workers for the new social order and to preserve and enrich the indigenous
177 Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964), 90.
178 John E. Edgerton, Lebanon, TN, to Myles Horton, response to invitation to speak, 19 June 1934, Box 11, Folder 10, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
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cultural values of the mountains.’ The paper goes ahead to state that the students are trained as labor organizers and that Mr. Dombrowski, ‘who has traveled in Russia,’ will tell all about his impression of the Soviet and its accomplishments. Of course, I declined the invitation in courteous, but vigorous terms. This enterprising of destruction requires no comment from me. It is about the boldest and most insulting thing to the Anglo-Saxon South that has yet been done.179
Many others had a similar view of the bold insults that Edgerton perceived. Opposition to
Highlander seemed to increase steadily as its educational outreach gained more positive
attention from the mountain people who were desperate to find a way to survive the
depression.180
Myles Horton believed just as strongly that union organizing could lift people up
as his adversary John E. Edgerton believed it could bring down the entire region. From
Horton’s first effort in that direction, which led to his arrest in Wilder, in early 1933, he
sensed that a battle was ahead. He was charged with “coming here getting information
and going back and teaching it” in Fentress County, and reporting the misuse of Red
Cross funds and the activities of state guards and their ill treatment of strikers.181
“Charges of communism and subversion at Highlander began during that period,” a
Methodist social journal, Concern, reported. And nearly a decade later, they continued –
indeed continued for decades to come.182 Horton and other staff members at Highlander,
at least in the beginning, did not foresee the intensity of the opposition. Perhaps they
179 Tennessee Manufacturers Association, “Tennessee Manufacturers Association Bulletin,” bulletin, Nashville, TN, 28 June 1934, Box 11, Folder 10, MSS 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
180 Durham, “Opposition in process,” 71.
181 Horton to Tennessee newspapers, 28 Nov. 1932, HC Papers, Box 76.
182 Edgar A. Gossard, “The Trouble at Highlander” (1959), Concern 15.1 (23 October 1959): 3.
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were certain their motivations and goals were humanitarian, perhaps they were naïve,
perhaps they were headstrong, or perhaps all of these factors played a part in their
activities. It is evident, however, that the men took their ideals to the public with lectures
on socialism and the coming of a new social order. Not only did they lecture, but also
they put their ideas in print through interviews with reporters and writing articles and
letters to the editor for both community and union newspapers.183
The resulting exposure brought immediate scrutiny and angry reaction. In January
1933, when Highlander was barely two months old, a reporter from the Knoxville News
Sentinel interviewed Horton. He eagerly explained the principles of socialism and its
impact on economic trials and class-consciousness, evidently assuming the benefit of
those ideas to the people of East Tennessee would be clear in the resulting article. The
headline on the story showed that would not be the case: “New Economic System to
Replace Capitalism, Says Young Teacher: Uncertain if Violence Will Be Felt.” Just
weeks later, the Chattanooga News followed with a story titled “Socialist School Seeks
Converts in Mountains; Horton and West Would Send Disciples Out to Urge the
Abolition of the Profit System.”184 Highlander co-founder Don West responded with a
letter to the editor that claimed the News misunderstood Highlander’s ideas for
stimulating the economy, but the publisher of the paper, like other business leaders in the
state, understood one thing: socialism and other radical ideas threatened their businesses,
their communities and the social order of the entire region.185
183 Durham, “Opposition in process,” 72.
184 Ibid., 50.
185 Ibid., 35.
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Their fears were not calmed by the fact that in Highlander’s first year, the school
played an active part in the miners’ strike at Wilder and in the bugwood cutters’ strike in
Summerfield, Tennessee, Highlander’s home. The following year, when textile strikes
erupted en masse throughout the South, Highlander staffers were there for support. Still
later, when Grundy County’s Works Progress Administration leader administered the
federal program in such a way that it shut out those that it was designed to help,
Highlander not only supported the workers, but also led the strike. In 1937, the
Chattanooga News lashed out at the school again, in an article headlined “Mystery Veils
Secret Probe of Folk School; Highlander Institution Declared ‘Immoral and Dangerous’
in Report.” The article quoted Lyle C. Stovall, chairman of the Americanism Committee
of Chattanooga’s American Legion Posts, as saying that a Tennessee Highway Patrol
officer had gone undercover as a reporter and found that Highlander “was not a school,
but an instrument of fomenting class consciousness and teaching strike techniques.” The
article said Stovall denied neither he nor the Americanism committee had any part in the
investigation; it also said, however, that Stovall acknowledged that he had seen a copy of
the report. According to Stovall, the report said that Highlander, in addition to “teaching
strike techniques,” was guilty of other transgressions, namely, “1) There has been
immorality there. 2) Some drunkenness has been reported. 3) The ‘Internale’ (the
Communist song) is used to open meetings. “ The Chattanooga Free Press repeated the
allegations the following day, Horton reacted by organizing a national campaign that
generated hundreds of letters to News editor George Fort Milton. Meanwhile, Stovall
wrote a letter to Horton. “I did not say that the Highlander Folk School was ‘Immoral and
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Dangerous,’ nor did I say that the Communist song was used to open meetings.” It was
one of many instances of outright fabrication in news stories about Highlander.186
While the early media attention was concentrated for several years in East
Tennessee, in the papers in Grundy County, and the larger cities of Knoxville and
Chattanooga, the opposition soon spread. Surprisingly, one of the most ruthless attacks
came not from the conservative Nashville Banner, but from its morning competitor, the
Tennessean. When the man calling himself Professor John McDougal arrived in the fall
of 1939, he given access to the staff and treated hospitably, but when he began asking a
great many questions about communism, those present at Highlander grew concerned.
Their fears were confirmed when two more men arrived and identified themselves as
Tennessean photographers on assignment to shoot pictures for a feature story about
Highlander, even though no reporter came with them.187
Both the headlines and the content of the Tennessean’s six-part series revealed
that the reporter and the newspaper had a clear agenda opposing Highlander. The first
story’s headline read, “Using Grundy County as Laboratory, School Spreads Communist
Doctrines in State,” and the body of the story claimed that Highlander Folk School was
“a center, if not the center, for the spreading of Communist doctrine in thirteen
Southeastern states.” One story in the series quoted Myles Horton, who reportedly told
the reporter, “Everyone realizes capitalism is a failure and we should examine
communism.” Horton, however, was on a trip to California when the reporter came to
186 Durham, “Opposition in process,” and , Highlander, 53.
187 Glen, Highlander, 71.
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Highlander; he was not interviewed. More fabrication appeared in subsequent stories,
which grew increasingly sensational.188
As the 1930s came to an end, “the attitude of the press has changed but little,”
according to a letter from Highlander dated October 25, 1940. The strongest opponents
were “anti-administration” papers such as the Chattanooga Free Press, the Knoxville
Journal and the Nashville Banner. Indeed, a recent attack in the Banner “was inspired
purely from political motives.” The letter explained that Banner publisher James
Stahlman had spoken at a banquet for about three hundred aviation and industrial leaders
and “referred to the President as that sonofabitch in the White House!”189 It was not just
the President who came under attack; the First Lady’s support of Highlander brought still
more negative press. When Eleanor Roosevelt’s check to support scholarships for the
adult education programs was made public by the Tracy City National Bank, where
Highlander had deposited it, the bank official did not feel he had breached
confidentiality. Highlander staff member Leon Wilson, seeing a copy of the check in the
Chattanooga News Free-Press on August 11, 1940, called the bank and questioned Leon
Alton Henderson, a cashier and a member of the Grundy County Crusaders. Wilson,
summarizing the conversation, said Henderson told him, “The school was against the
government and he was going to fight it any way he knew how. . . . The school was a
public institution and so its affairs were public.” He told Wilson he had released the
188 Ibid.
189 “Grundy County Crusader notes,” Monteagle, TN, 25 October 1940, Box 33, Folder 4, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
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information, not as a representative of the bank, but as an individual “because he thought
it was a right and proper thing to do.”190
In the following months, Highlander learned that Henderson and his fellow
Crusaders were serious about their objective, “the demolition of Highlander Folk School,
last continuously operating labor school in the United States,” and their slogan, “No Ism
But Americanism.”191 Congress established the Dies Committee in 1938 to investigate
un-American activities, and Highlander was in its sights. The Crusaders, however, would
fill a gap, according to C.H. Kilby, of the Tennessee Consolidated Coal Company. Kilby
said the Dies Committee was not doing enough, and “it is the duty of every American
afflicted with un-American groups to act.” In the view of the Crusaders, the ten thousand
residents of Grundy County were certainly “afflicted” by Highlander Folk School and its
radical efforts. According to Horton, Kilby had been a leader in local opposition for many
years. At a meeting of the ‘Crusaders,’ Chairman Alvin Henderson – the bank cashier –
said, “I do not say the school is a subversive force, but we do say that they are against the
government and that now is no time for people to be against it.” A resolution was passed
to ask the folk school to move from Grundy County – to no avail. Highlander's union
work continued and the school moved toward a complete collaboration with the CIO. It
had not changed its mission, and neither had the Crusaders nor the newspapers across the
state changed theirs. 192
190 Ibid.
191 Ibid.
192 Ibid.
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CHAPTER V: ALLIES OF HIGHLANDER FOLK SCHOOL
Highlander Folk School’s adversaries, either those with powerful national voices,
such as John E. Edgerton, or those with local clout, such as the Grundy County
Crusaders, might have been successful in shutting Highlander down if the school had not
had equally powerful allies in both the country as a whole and in communities in and out
of the South. Some allies took advantage of newspapers and used the forum of letters to
the editor, thousands of which are available in the Highlander archives, revealing a vast
web of supporters. Some contributed money, from gifts from “fifty-one friends” who
provided the bulk of the fourteen hundred dollars on which the school operated in its first
year to the much-maligned one hundred dollars from Eleanor Roosevelt in 1940 and
subsequent years. Some used whatever platforms they had available to share information
about the school and its mission. 193
Myles Horton understood that the progressive ideas of Highlander would not
succeed in the hostile environment of the South without help from both inside and outside
the region. Key allies for Highlander during this period were Reinhold Neibuhr,
theologian and professor whom Horton had befriended at Union Seminary; Lillian
Johnson, property owner and educator, who donated the site for the school near
Monteagle; and Abram Nightingale, Congregationalist minister from Crossville.
193 “Letter No. 2, Summer 1933,” Madison, Wisconsin, Mss 265, Box 1, Folder 3, Highlander Research and Education Center, Wisconsin Historical Society.
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Connections in Nashville stemmed from relationships at Vanderbilt Divinity School,
including Alva Taylor, a Disciples of Christ minister and a teacher of social ethics. The
public support of Eleanor Roosevelt was a huge boost to the school. Last, and perhaps
most fundamental to Highlander, was the support from many labor unions that continued
to send students throughout this period.
Abram Nightingale
One of Horton’s earliest allies in the Cumberland Mountains was Abram
Nightingale. Myles Horton met Nightingale during his summer work for the Presbyterian
Church in the Cumberland Mountains during the twenties. Nightingale, a
Congregationalist minister, came to Tennessee in 1924 from New Jersey as a missionary
and stayed for thirty-two years.194 He often boarded travelers in his home, and this was
how he met Horton, whom he mentored while Horton worked in the mountains during
the summer of 1927. In his autobiography, The Long Haul, Horton described Nightingale
as an outsider who was more concerned with helping others than preaching. “He took in
wandering students and hoboes and always shared whatever he had. . . . The church was
more or less a means of making a living while he helped people,” Horton said.195 As
Horton pondered what he should do next after his summer in Ozone, Nightingale told the
young man that he did not yet have enough information or education to start a school.
Nightingale suggested that he go to Union Theological Seminary and study under Harry
194 John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 124.
195 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 20.
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Ward, the noted Social Gospel advocate. Horton followed Nightingale’s advice. When
Horton returned to Tennessee from Denmark in 1932, Nightingale introduced Horton and
Don West to Lillian Johnson, the educator from Memphis who was looking for someone
to take over her educational endeavors in Grundy County so she could retire. Horton
credited Nightingale with introducing him to many people both inside and outside the
mountains who eventually helped Highlander. He also pointed him in the right direction
and asked the right questions, “It was through his influence that I went to Union
Theological Seminary in the fall of 1929 to try to find out how to get social justice and
love together.”196
After the launch of Highlander Folk School, Nightingale was a key Cumberland
Mountain ally for several decades. During the Wilder coal strike, he was active in
offering information and help to the miners as well as seeking new sources for aid for
them.197
Reinhold Niebuhr
When Horton left Union Theological Seminary after a year, the most important
result of his experience in New York was that he had developed a mutually respectful
relationship with Reinhold Niebuhr, who had just begun his teaching career at Union in
1928. Niebuhr was to become one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth
century, with lasting works that include Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) and An
196 Ibid., 32.
197 Abram Nightingale, Crossville, TN, to Myles Horton, 11 January 1933, Box 19, Folder 15, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
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Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935). Niebuhr’s activism came early when, in his
first job after college, he witnessed both racial and labor struggles in Detroit, where he
served as an Evangelical minister from 1915-1928 and where he embraced the beliefs of
the Social Gospel movement. The Social Gospel insisted it was meaningless to
evangelize when people’s basic needs were unmet. If the workers were desperate for
food, shelter, and clothing, they would show little interest in the salvation of their souls.
The theology of the Social Gospel emphasizes action over doctrine, social responsibility
of the individual Christian, and commitment of individuals and the church to build a just
and compassionate kingdom of God on earth. The Social Gospel also emphasized the
responsibility of helping those whose needs were greater than one’s own.198
About the time Niebuhr met Horton, however, his ideas shifted away from the
Social Gospel. He came to advocate a philosophical position called Christian realism, and
openly criticized the Social Gospel advocates for their idealism about human nature. He
believed capitalism was failing, and the workingman was suffering because of the
dysfunction of the capitalistic system, a dynamic he interpreted as he observed Henry
Ford’s automotive domain in Detroit. It was this position that drew Horton to him, and
Niebuhr, in turn, encouraged Horton’s mountain school idea. They became close friends,
with Niebuhr becoming a fund-raiser, board member, and vocal supporter of Highlander
Folk School for the next four decades.199
198 Barbara A. Lundsten, “The Legacy of Walter Rauschenbusch: A Life Informed by Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28.2 (April 2004): 75-80.
199 Horton, The Long Haul, An Autobiography, 35.
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Horton returned to New York from Denmark in May 1932 and met with Niebuhr
in New York. Together they wrote a fundraising letter and sent it out to many of
Niebuhr’s acquaintances in various liberal religious and political organizations
throughout the county. It was not only Niebuhr himself, but this network of liberals with
humanistic sensibilities that made the alliance with Niebuhr important to Horton and
Highlander.200
Lillian Johnson
Another important ally was Lillian Johnson. Abram Nightingale told Myles
Horton and Don West about Lillian Johnson, an accomplished educator who lived near
Monteagle, Tennessee, when they were searching for a mountain school location.
Johnson wanted to find someone to take over her educational efforts in impoverished
Grundy County so she could retire to Florida. Johnson, like Horton, was a Tennessee
native. She was born in 1864 to a wealthy Memphis family, graduated from Wellesley in
1883, and then attended State Normal School in Cortland, New York. Her teaching career
began in 1886 at Hope Night School in Memphis and she later moved on to teach at
Vassar. In 1902 she earned a doctorate from Cornell University, then taught history at the
University of Tennessee from 1902 until 1904 when she was appointed president of the
Western College of Women in Oxford, Ohio. She returned to Memphis in 1908 where
she taught high school and worked until 1912 to establish what later would become the
University of Memphis.201
200 Horton, The Long Haul, An Autobiography, 60-62.
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Johnson’s attention turned from traditional academic pursuits to more practical,
hands-on education in 1913 when she began learning and teaching about farm
cooperatives. Her initiation into this educational arena came when she attended the
International Institute of Agriculture in Rome and returned to the United States to work
with Woodrow Wilson’s administration. From 1913 until 1915, she traveled throughout
the United States for the Department of Agriculture to promote agricultural cooperatives.
Beginning in 1915, Johnson chose to make a community center out of her large home in
Summerfield, a small town between Monteagle and Tracy City on the southern
Cumberland Plateau. She also attempted to establish a cooperative and offer community
educational opportunities there over the next seventeen years. While Johnson achieved
small gains from the time she began her endeavor, she found, as Horton and West would,
that there was not an easy solution to the social, educational, and economic problems that
had plagued the area for generations. By 1932, Johnson, then 66, wanted to retire. She
had contemplated passing her work on if she could find the right people.202
Horton and West visited her and talked about using her house and forty acres of
mountain farmland for the school. They eventually worked out a one-year trial period.
According to John Glen, “Following a series of meetings, she made a simple verbal
agreement with Horton and West. The two men could use her property for a school as
long as they ran it themselves, developed good relations with the community, and
201 Lillian W. Johnson, “Wellesley Class of 1885,” Graduate Woman, no. 73 (November/December 1979): 30-31.
202 Sherry Herbers, Ph.D. “The ‘Facts’ of the Life of Dr. Lillian Johnson Before Her Association with HFS,” (Outline presented during Highlander Conference in November 2005 in Nashville, Tennessee); and Lillian W. Johnson, “Wellesley Class of 1885,” Graduate Woman, no. 73, (November/December 1979): 30-31.
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achieved tangible results from their programs.”203 Though Johnson had some concerns
with the choices Horton made for Highlander, such as working with unions, ultimately
she relented. West’s early departure, and her deepening relationship with Horton,
precipitated her giving the deed to HFS two years later. Until her death in the fifties, she
remained an advocate of Highlander.204
Alva Taylor
Alva Taylor, a popular professor of social ethics at Vanderbilt University Divinity
School, was a hero to many students at Vanderbilt, particularly Highlander co-founder,
Don West. Vanderbilt hired Taylor in 1926. He was secretary of social welfare for the
Disciples of Christ at the church headquarters in Indianapolis when Vanderbilt
approached him to teach. Taylor earned a master’s degree at the University of Chicago in
1910, and while he was in Chicago he conducted fieldwork at Jane Addams’ Hull House,
a housing and education facility opened in the 1880s to help new immigrants adjust to
life in Chicago. Sympathetic to labor issues, he served on a committee of the Interchurch
World Movement that studied the steel strike of 1919.205 The committee’s work resulted
in the end of the seven-day week and the twelve-hour day in that industry. As secretary of
social welfare, Taylor conducted lectures, led discussion groups in colleges and
assemblies, wrote articles for periodicals, and made studies designed to increase the
203 John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2nd ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 22.
204 Ibid., 44.
205 Alva W. Taylor, “Unpublished autobiography,” Nashville, Tennessee, 1928, Box 1, Folder 5, Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 3.
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awareness of social situations, All were “directed toward inter-relationship between
races, between capital and labor, between nations, and to the work of churches in
promoting better relationships between these groups.” During the 1920s he also served on
the staff of The Christian Century, a liberal, socially conscious magazine.206
Taylor’s thinking evolved from the “preaching of social religion” to “practical
and constructive efforts at reform based upon scientific studies, propagated through
religious work. He advocated field studies of social situations through churches, followed
by constructive efforts to mediate between conflicting parties. Like Myles Horton, Taylor
responded in 1932 and 1933 to the coal miners’ strike in Wilder, Tennessee. Taylor and
Howard Kester, one of his former students, were instrumental in obtaining food and
clothing for the striking miners and their families. 207
These efforts, like those of Horton and Highlander, created a growing circle of
response to the difficult conditions. Taylor and his students would do field work, and on
their return to Nashville, they would report on the work – and the ongoing need – to
others, promoting a liberal outreach that ultimately benefited families like those of the
miners as well as the overall work of Highlander. While Taylor’s effort was not a
singular effort to promote Highlander, he quickly became a board member of the school.
His work, and his location in Nashville, provided a connection between Highlander and
some of his progressive colleagues in the Divinity School as well as people such as
Howard Kester, who later was instrumental in creation of the Sharecroppers Union;
Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist who was documenting African American economic
206 Ibid.
207 Ibid.
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disadvantages in the South while he was a professor at Fisk University; and Albert
Barnett, a minister and teacher at Scarritt College for Christian Workers.208 Taylor’s
approach to the social responsibility of the church was primarily one of reconciliation,
though he did not shy away from conflict. He explained this position in a letter in 1933,
stating, “If it is going to be radical in the usual sense of that word, then I should not
belong to either committee. Radicalism, as understood by all who read, means socialist or
communist. If the word conservative or reactionary were used I would resign. If we were
to be pro-capitalist I would resign. If we are to be ‘ministers of reconciliation’ and
advocates of equity and justice I belong.” He applied this belief only to himself; if his
students chose radical paths, he supported them. Among those who did were 1930s social
activists, Howard Kester, Claude Williams, and Don West, who later joined Horton to
found Highlander. 209
By 1934, however, Taylor was in danger of losing his job. His open alliances with
unions angered several board members, and Vanderbilt Chancellor James H. Kirkland
was working to eliminate Taylor’s job as Vanderbilt, too, experienced a financial crisis in
the depression, although it was somewhat lessened by Kirkland’s fiscal conservatism.
Even before the depression, though, the School of Religion suffered financially. In a
letter on March 3, 1934, Taylor said:
Things look a little blue for me here. I am on the ‘expansion program’ for which cash has to be raised from year to year. We have made it up to this year and it is looking almost hopeless. Of course that will demand curtailment and that affords an excellent time to let the ‘troublesome’
208 Carroll Van West, ed., Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture (Nashville, TN: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998), 486.
209 Alva W. Taylor, “Letter to Jerome,” Nashville, TN, 5 October 1933, Box 2, Folder 10, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
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fellows out. Vanderbilt is very conservative and the Chancellor is even against the New Deal. I am only a progressive but even a progressive looks radical to a reactionary. So the issue is in the lap of the gods.210
Taylor managed to keep his professorship through the next two years, but in the
spring of 1936 Kirkland eliminated his position. “The axe has fallen,” Taylor declared in
a letter to Sherwood Eddy. “The old chancellor ‘regrets’ that he has not the money to
continue my work.”211 Students and faculty protested the move, but Kirkland was
adamant. The faculty even found donors from outside the university to pay for the chair,
but that proposal failed as well. The activist teacher and longtime proponent of the Social
Gospel left the faculty, “plowing ahead, trusting the Lord and the New Deal.”212 He
remained on the board of directors of Highlander for several more years, and from 1939-
1940 he was an administrator at Cumberland Homesteads, in Crossville, Tennessee, a
New Deal project that employed some of the displaced miners from Wilder that Taylor
and Horton had championed in 1932-1933. In 1941, he became executive secretary of the
Council of Southern Mountain Workers and editor of Mountain Life and Work, a
quarterly periodical produced on behalf of the Council of Southern Mountain Workers.213
Taylor’s advocacy of workers continued as well as did Horton’s. In a copy of a
letter dated February 24, 1942, and addressed to Dr. Ralph E. Himstead, Taylor
summarized the facts of his termination at Vanderbilt. At the time, Himstead was
210 Alva W. Taylor, “Letter to Jerome,” letter, Nashville, TN, 3 March 1934, Box 2, Folder 11, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
211 Alva W. Taylor, “Letter to Sherwood Eddy,” letter, Nashville, TN, 16 May 1936, Box 2, Folder 16, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
212 Alva W. Taylor, “Letter to Milo,” letter, Nashville, TN, 3 January 1937, Box 2, Folder 18, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
213 Disciples of Christ Historical Society, “Alva Taylor papers: Scope and Content Biography,” Box 1, Folder 1, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
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secretary of the American Association of University Professors and continued the
association’s work to rectify improper treatment of workers through the AAUP well into
the McCarthy area. Taylor explained to Himstead that donors had been willing to make
up the salary deficit the university claimed, but when O. E. Brown, dean of the Divinity
School, approached Chancellor James Kirkland, the offer was turned down. “He
[Kirkland] acknowledged that it put him on the spot, also that it was not money but my
pro-labor teaching, which he said certain members of the board did not like, that
motivated his action,” Taylor wrote. Taylor also mentioned that his roles as a proponent
of both racial equality and the New Deal made him even more of a liability in the eyes of
the chancellor and three board members who were “notorious for their opposition to labor
organizations and reactionary in their social and economic views.” These almost certainly
included John E. Edgerton and James Stahlman, Vanderbilt alumni, board members and
businessmen who had fought against Highlander Folk School and labor unions for
years.214
Unions
When Highlander opened in 1932, it did not open with the strong support of
unions – not because unions opposed the school, but because they were weak throughout
the region, their power having dwindled with the twenties and weakened more as the
Great Depression took hold. Highlander, however, supported union activities from the
beginning, both in the Wilder mining strike and soon after with the textile strike, and the
214 Alva W. Taylor, “Letter to Sherwood Eddy,” letter, Nashville, TN, 24 February 1942, Box 2, Folder 32, Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
93
unions returned that support by sending students to the school. The weakened unions
combined with the depression, particularly in textile manufacturing, created a dire
economic situation for both industry and workers. The mill owners, already suffering
because of over production compounded by the fact that consumers could no longer
could afford their thread, yard goods, stockings, suits and blankets. They were
determined not to allow unionization of the mills. They were holding on to the South’s
greatest industrial advantage, low wages and plenty of native workers, and they were
determined that unions would not change their favorable position in this regard.215
With Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, however, many of these low-paid workers
saw a glimmer of hope that the balance of power between them and the owners was
shifting. While new local unions began to spring up throughout the South, between 1933
and 1935, Highlander Folk School was at the center of activity in East Tennessee. The
Wilder Coal Strike made a huge impact on Myles Horton. He saw the imbalance of
power between the workers and the owners and became determined to do what he could
to help the working class of the region. He believed the most efficient way to change the
system was through collective action—through unions.216
Local labor unions were one of the most important allies to Highlander Folk
School in the latter part of the 1930s. By the end of the decade HFS had a steady stream
of students sent from unions throughout South; however, this support came because of a
conscious effort by the staff to focus on helping local East Tennessee unions during the
215 James A. Hodges, New Deal Labor Policy and the Southern Cotton Textile Industry 1933-1941 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 11-12.
216 “Interview with Myles Horton Regarding the Highlander Book of Interviews”, transcript, Highlander Collection, New Market, Tennessee, Highlander Research and Education Center, 15-16.
94
mid-thirties. The staff of Highlander spent the first couple of years figuring out how to do
their educational work and where to recruit students. In the process of focusing on where
to get students, they created alliances with many local unions in East Tennessee,
primarily textile and mine workers. Highlander, from the beginning, believed in the
model of industrial unions rather than the craft-based unions of the old AFL, and the
textile and mining workers fit the school’s philosophy. In 1935 the staff decided to get
into the thick of things with union members in their region. They traveled to the picket
lines, lived in strikers’ homes and conducted classes onsite during strikes of hosiery
workers in north Georgia and southeast Tennessee. As a result of these activities,
Highlander became known as a trench-buddy to many union members in East Tennessee.
This reputation proved invaluable in spreading the Highlander reputation to union
leadership in the South as union membership grew during the next couple of years in the
region.217
Before the 1936 split between the AFL and CIO, there were many active AFL
affiliated unions in East Tennessee, particularly among textile and mine workers. John
Glen notes that in the summer of 1934, eighteen full time students attended HFS and
were members of United Mine Workers (UMWA), Amalgamated Clothing Workers of
America (ACWA), American Federation of Hosiery Workers (AFHW), and United
Textile Workers of America (UTWA).218 By the beginning of 1935, Highlander focused
on training union members, requiring that a student be a representative of a particular
217 “Report on Highlander Folk School for 1935,” internal report. Box 1, Folder 3, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
218 Glen, Highlander, 37
95
union to be admitted to classes.219 The school taught courses such as psychology related
to the union movement, history of the working class, labor history, parliamentary
procedure, and union organizing.220
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt’s sympathies with the problems of the nation’s working people
came long before she arrived in the White House with the national platform offered by
her role as First Lady. In 1922, she joined the Women’s Trade Union League, which had
been founded in 1903 by Jane Addams and other union supporters to try to secure better
working conditions for the working women of America as well as to encourage women to
become part of the labor movement and to help them gain access when it was denied.
“Perhaps most importantly, the WTUL emerged as the central meeting place for reform-
minded women interested in labor issues, and it was through the WTUL that many of
these women cultivated important political relationships,” Nancy Woloch wrote. She also
noted that that Eleanor Roosevelt’s active membership led other activist women to
become allies of Franklin Roosevelt and gave the WTUL access to politicians and a voice
in labor policy formulated in Washington. 221
By virtue of this long interest in the rights of workers, it was not unexpected that
Mrs. Roosevelt’s attention was captured by the economic ills in the South and, thus, the
mission of Highlander. President Roosevelt had requested that the National Emergency
Council look into the problems of the South in 1938. After seeing the council’s “Report
219 Ibid., 38.
220 Ibid., 37
221 Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 42.
96
on Economic Conditions of the South,” the president concluded, “It is my conviction that
the South presents right now the nation’s No. 1 economic problem – the nation’s
problem, not merely the South’s. For we have an economic unbalance in the nation as a
whole, due to this very condition of the South.”222
A quick response to that was the formation of the Southern Conference for
Human Welfare (SCHW), which held its first conference in Birmingham, Alabama, in
November 1938. With more than 1200 people attending, “the SCHW’s historian says,
‘the convention delegate and guest lists could have formed the nucleus for a who’s who
in Southern liberalism.’”223 Among them were Myles and Zilphia Horton and Bill
Buttrick from Highlander. Other participants included SCHW leader Frank Graham,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Hugo Black, Aubrey Williams, and several presidents of black
colleges. Two years later, the conference met in Chattanooga, and during that time,
Eleanor Roosevelt met with a group from Highlander. Shortly afterward, she donated the
first of several one-hundred dollar scholarships to the school. On February 1, 1941, John
Glen wrote in Highlander: No Ordinary School, Roosevelt delighted staff by renewing
her contribution to Highlander. She had concluded that the school’s enemies opposed it
not “because of any communist activities, but because they are opposed to labor
organizations and, therefore, labor education,” which in her opinion was “a most unwise
and shortsighted attitude.”224 In May 1942, a benefit concert in Washington featured
renowned black baritone Paul Robeson as well as the formation of a national sponsoring
222 David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis, eds., Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions in the South with Related Documents (New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 42.
223 John T. Kneebone, Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 155.
97
committee that included Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent individuals, sparked a
gradual rise in contributions to the school in 1942.225
Conclusion
So it was that Highlander’s allies, from local Grundy County residents and
Nashville professors to labor unions and the First Lady of the United States, countered
Highlander’s adversaries every step of the way, taking Highlander not only through the
1930s, but through decades to come. For example, when the Grundy County Crusaders
set out in 1940 to rid the county of Highlander Folk School, Horton was first tipped off
by a reporter from The Tennessean, which had been both adversary and ally of the
school. As noted in the previous chapter, the Crusaders, led by C.H. Kilby, a bookkeeper
and secretary of Tennessee Consolidated Coal Company, published a copy of Eleanor
Roosevelt’s check – the copy that had been released by the bank to the local newspaper –
and distributed thousands of copies on flyers throughout the area. Horton saw the
Crusaders, particularly Kilby’s involvement, as a repudiation of the progress made on
behalf of labor, so he sought the CIO’s help to counter it. At a meeting, Highlander was
able to produce all its records of contributions, students and visitors and offered them for
public examination. The Crusaders, on the other hand, could produce no evidence of their
charges of communism or un-Americanism. As a result, the Crusaders helped to increase
support for the school they abhorred. Members of many craft unions as well as local
residents gave financial support according to their means. A farmer in Hamilton County
224 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Letter to James Dombrowski,” Monteagle, TN, 1 February 1941, Box 82, Folder 7, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
225 Glen, Highlander, 10.
98
offered 180 acres of land for the school if it had to leave Grundy County. Educator John
Dewey himself referred to Highlander as “one of the most important social-educational
projects in America.” Civil libertarians, many of whom might not have found common
ground with Highlander in practice, defended the school in principle because they
believed free expression was essential to the democratic process. That democratic process
is the foundation that has kept Highlander alive for seventy-five years.226
226 C. Alvin Hughes, “A New Agenda for the South: The Role and Influence of the Highlander Folk School, 1953-1961 ,” Phylon 46.3 (1985): 243.
VI: CONCLUSION
Highlander Folk School emerged in the early 1930s at the confluence of the
tradition-bound southern power brokers whose economic and social power were
wavering and a generation of idealistic young people who believed in a democracy that
would empower the working class. A decade later, the depression had lifted, but the
nation was mired in World War II, with many of the generation who were coming of age
out of the country and fighting on foreign soil. Highlander co-founder Myles Horton,
who believed in the power of adult education to bring about social change, saw the focus
of his school shift from labor education to civil rights. He remained committed, however,
to adult education within specific social contexts rather than in pedagogical theory. In
effect, Highlander, through the attacks it faced from local and national adversaries,
survived, its mission intact, its work ongoing. Horton believed that all Americans, if
given the opportunity through education and some advocacy, could have a voice in their
own destiny.
In a newsletter published in 1968, Horton looked back at Highlander’s beginning,
noting, “Education is a profound political act, especially if education takes place among
the poor. But change in the social structure to divert more social productivity to those
who have the least can only come about as a result of changes in the political and
economic institutions of this country. From the beginning, Highlander was oriented
toward social education to be followed immediately by action.”227 The social action
required to change the political and economic institutions of the 1930s was by virtue of
time and place to educate predominantly unskilled and uneducated workers to improve
their conditions and share what they learned with their peers. Highlander almost certainly
would not have taken the labor slant if the 1930s had not been an era in which the
struggles of unions were so prominent. The struggles of the workers, however, were the
social and economic norm of both time and place. Highlander responded when it opened
its doors, and continues today, serving yet another generation of people of the
Cumberland Mountain region whose diversity has expanded with an influx of Latin
American immigrants facing labor issues eerily similar to those of the miners and textile
workers of the 1930s.
In the early days, Highlander’s efforts to educate Southern workers about labor
unions threatened an economic and social status quo that was already at risk as the Great
Depression took hold. Highlander, on a small scale, like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,
of national magnitude, told workers that they had rights. The workers could exercise
those rights to organize or to join a union, to ask for higher wages and better working
conditions, and to strike if management denied their rights. And there was the rub. The
influential industrialists and their friends and supporters held power and used it to keep
wages low, giving Southern industries an economic advantage over their Northern
competitors. While Myles Horton did not set out to improve the mountain people’s lives
at the expense of the factory owners, he would have been hard pressed to convince his
227 Dale Jacobs, ed., The Myles Horton Reader, Education for Social Change (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 8.
powerful adversaries of that fact. From November 1, 1932, when it opened to students,
Highlander’s programs were designed to empower labor. As a result, many of the people
who came out against Highlander were afraid, despite their power and authority. They
were afraid of outsiders, and they were afraid of change. Men such as John E. Edgerton
and James Stahlman were particularly fearful that the old order would shift, and endanger
their businesses and their power. Horton was arguing and educating for a true democracy
that would give working people some control over their destinies. A careful reading of
Horton’s thoughts, from his autobiography to numerous interviews, reveals clearly that
he believed in the inherent ability of human beings to work together toward a greater
good, given an opportunity. He believed adult education was the pathway to this
opportunity. Because Horton was careful to keep Highlander’s work apart from any
political or religious affiliation, he did not promote Highlander’s ideals based on specific
Christian teachings; in his work, however, the underlying idea of loving one’s neighbor is
evident, albeit not one that would ring out from a pulpit.
Every time Highlander reached out to its neighbors, however, leaders who feared
the rising voices of the common man lashed out. Deciding how to respond to the attacks
from the adversaries sometimes set the staff at odds with each other. Myles Horton,
James Dombrowski, Bill Buttrick, and some others at Highlander wrote letters and spoke
in community meetings, believing that if they told the truth, i.e., that Highlander had no
political agenda and certainly no communist agenda, the adversaries would retreat,
leaving Highlander to continue its work for the good of its neighbors. Friction arose,
however, because at least one staffer believed Highlander was not obliged to defend
itself. Staffer Zilla Hawes, angry about the amount of time and energy the adversaries
drained from achieving the core objectives at Highlander, argued that Highlander’s goal
was to organize for a new social order, not to ensure its good name. She addressed her
concern in a 1937 letter to another staffer, “I cannot believe that absorption in answering
the red-baiting of the press . . . overshadowed all other considerations. I saw self-
absorption, and if that is the same thing you refer to as school-mindedness, then I too will
say again that HFS is overly school-minded.”228 From the beginning however, Horton
worked to defend Highlander from the critics who launched charges that ranged from
communist affiliation to immorality to selling beer without a license. Overall, Highlander
represented change, and fear clouded the potential for change not only among the
working class, but also among the powerful landowners and business and industrial
leaders. If Highlander could not maintain a reputation among some groups for
commitment to the communities of the Cumberland Plateau, Horton knew the school
would not survive; it had to defend itself when and where it could.
John E. Edgerton, in his years as president of the National Association of
Manufacturers and the Southern States Industrial Council, left a written record that shows
he was self-righteous and judgmental toward those who would change the “Anglo-Saxon
purity” of the South and the nation. In his active public years in the 1920s and 1930s, he
was considered to be a good man who provided for his family and his employees. His
argument against labor, boiled down to simple terms, was if I don’t trust the people who
work for me, and if they don’t trust me, we don’t have a basis for working together. In
fact in an interview with the New York Times in 1922, he addressed unions organizing at
228 Elizabeth Hawes, Highlander staff member writing from Wilmington, NC, to Ruth, Highlander staff member, 2 March 1937, Box 14, Folder 29, Record Group 265, Highlander Research and Education Center Records, Wisconsin Historical Society.
Lebanon Woolen Mill, “My plant is small and my employees can organize for better
working conditions, but I do not propose to have them taught that they must get justice
out of me with a club—I want them to trust my sense of honor.”229 It was the
paternalistic attitude that generations of Southern white men had held, and it was the
frame of reference for small businesses and industries in the rural communities where
everyone knew everyone else, from the company president to the cleaning crew.
In the early 1930s, however, the depression had struck so hard that the mood in
the country was increasingly unfavorable toward business. That stood in sharp contrast to
the 1920s, when workers often accepted their working conditions without protest and
expressed gratitude for their jobs to their employers, however paternalistic they might
have been. Employees, sensing a sea change, wondered if capitalism had failed. The
employers often had the same question. Undercurrents were in the air long before
Highlander arrived. Communism had long been the bogeyman, a catch-all to lodge fear in
the public. Increasingly, socialism was discussed as an economic solution to provide a
more equitable distribution of wealth and alleviate some of the hardship the nation faced.
The business leaders knew the unrest in America was not on the scale that
produced the mass uprising in Russia, and they knew that they were not czars. Closer to
home, they knew they had better control over their workers than their northern
counterparts, who had allowed unions to gain a powerful foothold. Increased wages,
shorter hours and improved working conditions in some of the northern factories had
been costly to the owners. Nevertheless, in dealings with labor, men like Edgerton and
Stahlman reacted to the idea that a powerful labor movement could bring a kind of
229 “Open Shop Wanted by Manufacturers,” New York Times, 9 May 1922, 12.
revolution. Edgerton thought he had the power to resist change with the Southern States
Industrial Council, the organization he was instrumental in founding in 1933 after he left
his post as president of the National Association of Manufacturers. The SSI thought
NAM did not go far enough to oppose Roosevelt – although Edgerton was a Democrat
and a delegate in the 1928 Democratic National Convention. He and his fellow SSIC
members opposed the New Deal and labor unions. They attacked the Tennessee Valley
Authority because they believed government should not compete with private industry.
Horton, on the other hand, would argue that people and their needs mattered most.
He believed when people were jobless, hungry, and homeless, they deserved an
opportunity to improve their lives. Highlander’s programs and the efforts of the staff
were to help people survive and ultimately to thrive. While many industrialists viewed
TVA as unfair competition, Horton saw an agency that could provide jobs for many who
had been out of work since the mills and mines that had employed them shut down. He
called upon Arthur Morgan, TVA chairman, to look to the unemployed mountain men as
he sought workers for TVA and related projects. The Highlander programs to educate
men and women in labor organizing continued, even though the unions faced difficult
battles as they fought the “open shop” that Edgerton and others so cherished.230
These very human struggles allowed Highlander Folk School to become one of
the most innovative and courageous institutions in the South. Through the labor struggles
in the late thirties and forties, followed by the civil rights movement in the fifties and
sixties, Highlander held fast to its vision, led by Horton, a thoughtful leader who believed
230 Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets 1929-1959 (Charlottsville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 14.
in education and the greater good. According to Horton, whose personal philosophy,
which was the foundation of Highlander, “I have a holistic view of the educative process.
The universe is one: nature and mind and spirit and the heavens and time and future all
are part of the big ball of life. Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will
add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they’re already together
and you try to keep from destroying life by segmenting it, over-organizing it and
dehumanizing it.”231
Myles Horton wanted people to know and use their power, rather than to be
subjected to the top-down paternalistic philosophy of business and industry. For all the
power the adversaries held, Highlander, a grassroots organization, not only survived the
attacks, but the staff managed, through the backlash from the adversaries, to learn new
strategies that would carry them through. Other labor colleges such as Brookwood Labor
College in New York and Commonwealth in Arkansas came to an end. Highlander’s
original aim to educate people for a revolution that would forever alter the economic and
social structure of America did not come to pass. Poverty, racism, and threats to human
rights remain in America. Highlander, too, remains, now in its seventy-fifth year of
existence and continuing to support “people working for equality and justice.” 232 Horton,
in a 1977 interview, expressed the importance of continuing to work toward the goals of a
better society, saying, “maybe you won’t ever achieve them, but that’s where you’re
231 Myles Horton, with Herbert Kohl and Judith Kohl, The Long Haul, An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 130.
232 “Highlander Research and Education Center Home Page,” 11 March 2007, available at http://www.highlandercenter.org/ (11 March 2007).
moving. That’s your lodestar.”233
233 Dale Jacobs, ed., The Myles Horton Reader, Education for Social Change (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 261.
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