Rand School (former)

The Rand School, founded in 1906, was one of many educational institutions created by the American Socialist Society expressly for the transmission of socialist ideas. It is arguably the first, but unquestionably the longest-lived of these schools. Housed for many years in a former YWCA building on East 15th Street, the school is particularly remembered for the integral role it played in the lives of its many working-class students. The school closed in 1956.

The Rand School was founded by the American Socialist Society and named for Carrie Rand, who bequeathed $700,000 to the Socialist Party with the express intention of founding an educational institution. Initially established to extend the “understanding and practice of socialism,” it soon expanded its course offerings to include vocational training and non-socialist courses in the humanities. During its peak years in the early 1920s, the school counted over 5,000 enrolled students and held frequent lectures by notables such as August Claessens, Helen Keller, W.E.B. Dubois, Bertrand Russell, Diego Rivera, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London.

In 1917, after 11 years of temporary leases, the Rand School found a permanent home in a former YWCA building at 7 East 15th Street. The five-story brick, stone, and terracotta structure, originally built in 1885, was christened “the people’s house” after the “mission du peuple” in Belgium. Interestingly, it was not unlike a socialist YWCA, with facilities including classrooms, a library, bookstore, auditorium, and gymnasium. The school also rented out office space to a variety of union locals and socialist groups, and it was home to the Socialist Party headquarters.

The Rand School was not an anomalous part of the fabric of New York City’s political scene. Up until the Cold War, Socialist Party members were elected to the State Assembly, Communists held seats on the City Council, and the crowds from mass political rallies filled Madison Square Garden. Moreover, leftist politics included both “mass” and elite elements. Benefits were held at the Metropolitan Opera with receptions at the Waldorf=Astoria. The Rand School was located just off Union Square, a nexus of much leftist political activity. A few years after the school opened, the Communist Party splintered from the Socialist and situated its headquarters and educational institution, the Jefferson School, on the opposite end of Union Square Park at 35 East 12th Street.

Nor was the Rand School unique in offering classes to working-class people. At the time, the city had a remarkable array of affordable educational resources–both City College and Hunter College offered free courses and, unlike the Rand School, these institutions were accredited. Cooper Union also provided a robust free lecture series. The Rand School’s popularity, then, was due at least in part to the complete social life it offered its students, who were primarily young, white “ethnic” working-class immigrants who were, more often than not, also members of the Socialist Party. In addition to academic classes, the school offered physical education classes and threw dances every Friday and Saturday. A historian of the school, Frederic Cornell, wrote, “It was their school, not the city’s or some philanthropist’s.”

Outside the ranks of the Socialist Party, the Rand School is probably best known for its enemies. In a climate of generalized anti-radical hysteria following World War I and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the New York State Assembly appointed a special committee in 1919 to investigate New York State radical activities. Named for its chairman, Senator Clayton Lusk, the Lusk Committee raided the Rand School offices in that year and confiscated its archives, some of which remain in the New York State archives to this day. The school successfully fought the committee’s attempts to close it by court order in 1920 and 1922. After these very public triumphs, the school began a sustained period of growth along with the Socialist Party, ending somewhat abruptly after World War II.

Ironically, this school that was founded to teach and spread socialism was never able to fill its classes on socialist theory and practice. Since the school’s inception, these courses proved to be among the least popular with students who favored conventional social-science courses over socialist ones and vocational and practical training over the humanities. In 1913, the school began to offer extremely popular classes in English and naturalization as well as vocational courses in such topics as typing, bookkeeping, and penmanship. The school also operated a vast network of satellite schools in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side, focusing on English and naturalization. And, it offered a Trade Union Institute, political training for members of the Labor and Socialist Parties, a high school division, and numerous correspondence courses.

Though the school charged modest tuition, the majority of its financial support came from the Jewish newspaper “The Forward,” benefits at the Metropolitan Opera and Madison Square Garden, and most prominently, Camp Tamiment. Camp Tamiment was a resort in the Pocono Mountains operated by the People’s Educational Camp Society, a socialist institution. It was opened shortly after the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union decided to purchase a vacant Poconos hotel in 1919, which they named Unity House. Unity House catered to families, and Camp Tamiment to singles. Although earnest intentions may have driven the creation of these resorts, the socialist aspect receded after a few years, leaving two extremely profitable places of leisure that catered to New York’s liberal Jewish middle-class. Compromised in its own educational mission, Camp Tamiment held on to its non-profit status by donating its proceeds to the Rand School. (Camp Tamiment also became a landmark on the Jewish comedy circuit. Max Liebman produced a weekly review there, whose parody-based skits would later form the structure of “Saturday Night Live.” In the postwar years, Neil Simon and Woody Allen both spent summers there.)

As the ranks of the Socialist Party diminished after World War II, the Rand School’s enrollment dropped sharply. In 1956, the People’s Building was transferred to the People’s Educational Camp Society, which folded nine years later. The building was then sold to the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers. The Rand School’s library became the foundation of NYU’s Tamiment Collection, a vast archive of New York’s leftist movements held at the Bobst Library at 70 Washington Square South.