The Jefferson School of Social Sciences was the flagship for a nationwide network of schools founded and run by the Communist Party. Until the early 1940s they had been called Workers Schools. When the Party wrapped itself in the American flag it renamed the schools after famous Americans. The Harlem Workers School, for instance, became the George Washington Carver Institute. In their early days many of the schools, which offered adult education courses in Marxist theory and community organizing, operated from local Communist Party headquarters.
Adult education was an important part of liberal and leftist urban culture since the early Twentieth Century offering educational opportunities to immigrants and their children, as well as to other members of the working class. The schools also taught union organizing techniques. The Socialists had founded the Rand School in 1906. It was located at 7 East 15th Street in a building formerly occupied by the YWCA. The school had been the target of red baiters at the time of the First World War and again in the 1950s. It closed in 1956. The AFL unions had also operated Workers Schools, which dated back to the ILGWU's Workers University founded in 1918, which had drawn its instructors from the City College faculty. The union efforts had WPA funding until 1942 despite protests from right wingers over the curriculum and faculties of these schools and from some established educators who complained that these institution and their instructors did not often meet professional standards (in addition to maintaining a certain quality level, "professional standards" are also frequently a way to control competition). With the demise of much of the union-based schools after the WPA was dismantled, the CPUSA stepped up the activities of its adult education system
In 1946 the Jefferson School of Social Science occupied a nine-story building at 575 Sixth Avenue and enrolled as many as 5,000 students at a time. It also offered courses at annexes throughout the city. The faculty included some distinguished Marxist scholars, artists, writer and musicians, some of whom had been expelled from City University during the Rapp-Coudert anti-Communist purge. Pete Seeger , who seems to pop up all over the Left in 1946, was among the instructors. To its critics this was not an institution devoted to independent thinking or open discourse. It did not value academic freedom or permit open inquiry when it came to the Communist Party, the Soviet Union or Comrade Stalin. Courses adhered closely to the Party line. It was more akin to a rigidly conservative theological seminary except that the orthodox doctrines of this church kept changing. In 1945 when Earl Browder was ousted from Party leadership under direction from Moscow, school administrators were ordered to purge the faculty of his supporters and adjust course material to scour out any of his decadent deviations. The school continued for another decade until the Subversive Activities Board forced it to close in 1956.
The curriculum sought to build "class consciousness" by filtering material through a narrow Stalinist lens but it was not all about theory. Courses also instructed committed party followers on practical ways to influence and manipulate unions, front groups and community and cultural organizations to align them with party doctrines and goals. This is what led those on the Right to label the school a training ground for subversives. The school also offered liberal arts courses. An ad that ran in The New York Times in January for the school's winter session noted courses in opera, folk music and the recorder. On Saturdays the school offered free story times for Red Diaper babies. In February it exhibited work from members of its art department.
The Jefferson School sponsored a dinner at the Hotel Pennsylvania in early February. The scheduled speakers included the brilliant detective story writer Dashiell Hammett, who was teaching at Jefferson at this time, the labor organizer and Party activist Ruth Young, prominent socialite/activist Frederick V. Field, the Rev. Stephen H. Fritchman, Gwendolyn Bennett, the school's director Dr. Howard Selsam, and from London special guest Professor J.B.S. Haldane, a prominent geneticist who was also chairman of the editorial board of the British Daily Worker. The link to Young above includes a brief, interesting recollection of her life at this time which shows how relatively normal the lives of the party faithful were outside of the sphere of their political activities. They were not fulltime Boris and Natashas in trench coats carrying bombs and plotting the imminent overthrow of the government. The Wikipedia entry on Field, born into the economic aristocracy- the V in his name stands for Vanderbilt- notes his recollections that at this time to Party members and most fellow travelers, Stalin was as infallible as the Pope was to devout Catholics and his decisions no more open to question. To this tautological way of thinking, Stalin's purges were not troubling because the Soviet justice system was perfect and therefore the outcome of the trials by definition were just. Fritchman was a Unitarian clergyman who was ousted in 1947 as editor of the denominational magazine because many in his theologically and politically liberal denomination felt he had gone too far into turning ithe magazine into a Stalinist propaganda organ. He would later become a prominent clergyman activist in Los Angeles. Bennett was a well-regarded African American writer who was the director of the George Washington Carver School in Harlem,.
In May there was mention of the Jefferson School in the NYT as one of two venues where advanced tickets could be purchased for a symposium, "Religion: Barrier or Bridge to American-Soviet Understanding," to be held at the Capitol Hotel. Dr. Harry F. Ward was the featured speaker among a panel of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religious leaders. The Institute of Applied Religion was the sponsor. Ward had been a long time teacher at Union Theological Seminary who retired in 1941. He was a leader in the left wing of the Social Gospel movement in the Protestant churches. His close association with unions and his chairmanship of the Civil Liberties Union drew him into the Communist Party orbit. He served as president of the American League Against War and Fascism, a Comintern affiliated organization that sought to enlist religious leaders in support of a policy of pacifism and anti-Fascism. The coalition broke apart in short order over heavy-handed tactics by the Stalinists to control it . Much of its Socialist and pacifist membership left, along with the groups like the NAACP. The group remained active until the Hitler-Stalin pact. Ward's close association with Communist front organizations eventually diminished his once considerable influence in religious circles.
The People's Institute of Applied Religion was a Popular Front group initially centered in the South. The South was a source of frustration for the Communist faithful and fellow travelers as well as to union organizers. With its plantation tradition and large economically deprived underclass, it appeared to offer the best opportunity to recreate the Bolshevik experience in the US . But its racial divisions and social conservatism proved an insurmountable hurdle. In 1946 the CIO launched Operation Dixie, targeting the region for union organizing. The Institute of Applied Religion was one tool. It operated a school for laymen preachers to promote racial integration, class consciousness and CIO union membership. It's theological perspective could be gleaned from a quote from its handbook which defined Salvation as "the result of the collective effort of the workers and other victims of this world system to save themselves from the oppressor." Operation Dixie was a big flop.