This Day in Labor History: January 18, 1913

On January 18, 1913, teachers in New York City held the first meeting of what would become the Teachers League in New York. This would spur the creation of the American Federation of Teachers a few years later and moved forward American teacher unionism significantly.

Organizing teachers was not always easy. It was not a job that often appealed to people with a clear class consciousness and more to the point, teachers didn’t always see themselves as workers. Long a problem with the middle class professions, the lack of class consciousness has gotten in the way of organizing. This is actually a lot less of a problem today than it ever has before. But it took a lot of time and work, even in the cities where teacher organizing would have legs. The first teacher organizing began in Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Federation was founded in 1897, but it didn’t spread much.

New York Teachers began to organize by the early 1910s. The issues were a combination of bread-and-butter issue such as salary and pensions and the desire to control their own work in opposition to increasingly centralized school administrators who were applying the same deskilling tactics in the rest of the country’s workplace to education. Women’s issues were also big. By this time, women were starting to take over much of the teaching profession. There were rhetorical reasons why this made sense–much of it came out of the Progressive Era maternal instinct and the desire to surround children with professional women among these folks. But from an administrative perspective, it made sense because you could pay them less and control them for “morality.”

In 1912, teachers funded the creation of American Teacher, a magazine intended as an organizing tool. A dozen teachers made this happen with their labor, led by Henry Richardson Linville, originally from Kansas City, and Benjamin Gruenberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Both were highly educated, with PhDs in scientific fields and both taught at some of the best schools in the city. All twelve were Socialist Party members. Their goal was not a big conversation to socialism, though they were Eugene Debs people personally. They wanted a self-managed school system. This got in the way of the reforming mentality of people such as Nicholas Murray Butler, who had centralized New York schools in the 1890s as to separate them from ward politics. That probably made sense–Tammany didn’t need to be choosing teachers–but also undermined the independence of teachers.

On January 18, 1913, the Teachers League formed, the next logical step by the American Teacher folks, Not all were men, it needs to be stated. There were lots of women’s voices in American Teacher, not only teachers themselves but also bigger names such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In fact, the Teachers League started at the school founded by the socialist educator Jessica Finch and developed ties to the Women’s Trade Union League, which was mostly a middle and upper class group of reformer allies rather than workers themselves, but which also had close ties to the garment workers. There was then a mass meeting on February 28, attending by over 2,000 teachers, to make the Teachers League official.

The Teachers League was immediately controversial. There were lots of other small professional organizations among teachers who saw this new group as a threat. There were also men’s and women’s teacher organization who opposed the gender inclusivity and relative political radicalism of the Teachers League. Now, the Teachers League did not at this time see themselves as members of a union. This was about self-governance and democratic restructuring of the education system more than trade unionism. But there wasn’t really that much difference between the two in the vision of the League. Like teacher unionism today for instance, one of the things that really drove the League was hatred of top-down teaching evaluations that didn’t represent the wholeness of their work. And like those who think that everything can be reduced to test scores today in order to get an easy number and not have to do the work of real teacher evaluation, administration in 1913 resisted any other means of evaluation.

The Teachers League turned into the Teachers Union of the City of New York in 1916. That same year, the American Federation of Teachers formed. The Teachers Union became Local 5, one of the original locals and its largest. The move toward official unionism came about for a number of reasons. First, in 1914, New York schools decided to compel teachers to work in summer school without providing them extra pay. That brought all these teacher associations together and showed to many why unionism was needed. But gender issues were also central–women teachers wanted to right to teach after having children, which the administration did not want. Policy was mothers had to stay at home with their own children. As it turns out, the word “feminism” became mainstream in American culture in 1913 and so the timing of this demand tacked on the new word to great effectiveness. The third main issue was freedom of speech for teachers, as administrators wanted to discipline teachers who spoke out against the Board of Education, even outside the classroom. Finally, demands for pensions grew.

So finally, in 1916, the Teachers League decided to join the American Federation of Labor, as other teacher unions around the nation were starting to do. Samuel Gompers was open to this. In fact, this was exactly the kind of skilled labor he thought was appropriate for his federation. This desire was not unanimous for the teachers. Some thought a more professional organization was appropriate, such as the National Education Association. Today of course the NEA is a major union, but back then it was a bit more management and professional focused than today. The NEA really moved toward full-fledged unionism in the 1970s. In any case, 2,000 teachers showed up to a mass meeting where Gompers spoke and approved of their activities.

The fight for teacher unionism has been long. Even among many liberals, as we saw in the heyday of “education reform” that was shared by Barack Obama as much as George W. Bush and with hucksters and con artists such as Michelle Rhee considered important and serious through 2015, real support for teacher unionism is often minimal. Today, teachers are among the most powerful and important of unions and their fight for justice at the schools is our fight for justice in the nation.

I borrowed from Christopher Phelps, “Why Did Teachers Organize? Feminism and Socialism in the Making of New York Teacher Unionism,” published in Modern American History in 2021, to write this post.

This is the 588th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.