San Francisco Workers' School
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| Successor | California Labor School |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1934 |
| Dissolved | circa 1942 |
| Purpose | educational, propagandist, indoctrinal |
| Headquarters | 121 Haight Street, San Francisco |
| Services | ideological training center of CPUSA, adult education |
Key people | Anita Whitney, Samuel Adams Darcy, Langston Hughes, Lincoln Steffens, Ella Winter |
| Affiliations | Communist Party USA |
The San Francisco Workers' School was an ideological training center of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Founded in San Francisco in 1934, it offered evening classes in Marxism and labor organizing. Like other Communist schools that sprouted up around the U.S. in the Great Depression, it became a target of government investigation during the Second Red Scare.[1]
In 1934, Anita Whitney, Samuel Adams Darcy, Benjamin Ellisberg, Lincoln Steffens, and Steffens' wife Ella Winter co-founded the San Francisco Workers' School (SFWS). It was housed in the CPUSA headquarters at 121 Haight Street in central San Francisco.[1] The school's forerunner in the city had been the Jack London Memorial Institute (later renamed the People's Institute),[2][3] established in 1917 as a worker education center, library, and meeting hall.[4]
Here is how the SFWS was advertised in a May 1936 edition of the West Coast Communist newspaper, Western Worker:
The San Francisco Workers' School, Room 3, 121 Haight street, offers a wide variety of courses in Marxism-Leninism, current events, trade union problems—economics, history, etc. Just exactly what can you accomplish by attending the school? You can gain a scientific knowledge of the social forces operating in the world which will enable you to evaluate the past, understand the present, and look into the future.[5]
The SFWS only remained in existence for eight years. In 1942 it was transformed into the Tom Mooney Labor School, and two years later became the California Labor School (CLS).[6] Despite its brief tenure, the SFWS was a target of investigation during the McCarthy era when state and federal authorities sought to uncover evidence of Communist subversion and un-American propaganda in the U.S.[7] In the late 1940s, the California Senate Factfinding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, led by State Senator Jack Tenney, reported that the SFWS was "openly a school for instruction in Communism".[8] After the passage of the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, the Subversive Activities Control Board probed the SFWS and its "Phoenix-like characteristics" to reemerge as the Tom Mooney School and CLS.[6] In 1953 the former teachers and administrators at the SFWS were subject to scrutiny in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).[9]