Educating Communists: Eugene Bechtold and the Chicago Workers School

Abstract

“Workers’ Education Is Workers’ Power.” This slogan—emblazoned atop the brochure announcing the courses for the Fall term of 1936—captured the political convictions of the Chicago Workers School. Amidst the Great Depression and located in America’s definitive working city, the School proclaimed its “main task,” to equip students with the knowledge “to understand and participate in the class struggle,” based on “the scientific teachings of Marxism-Leninism.” Amid the many courses offered that term on, among other things, political education, revolutionary traditions, and applied dialectics, two more of them—on public speaking and the history of socialist theories—were taught by a pioneer communist and instructor of the School, Eugene Bechtold. In the annals of the American communist movement, virtually nothing is known or written about Bechtold compared to other pioneer communists. And there is scarcely much more known or written about the Chicago Workers School compared to the central Workers School in New York. Paying attention to them, however, as this essay intends to do, further fills out the historical picture of Chicago’s communist politics between the world wars as they (instructor and school) experienced it—labor struggles, protest demonstrations, mass meetings, party reorganizations, recruitment drives, education campaigns, study circles, public lectures, court proceedings, vigilante spies, and a notorious raid on a secret underground convention. But it mainly underscores the enormous and elaborate energies that went into educating communists. Taking Bechtold and the School as its subjects, this essay views Chicago’s communist politics and pedagogy from their respective horizons at a busy middle level, individually in the person of Bechtold, institutionally in the case of the Chicago Workers School.