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You Can't Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961
You Can't Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961
You Can't Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961
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You Can't Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961

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You Can't Padlock an Idea examines the educational programs undertaken at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and looks specifically at how these programs functioned rhetorically to promote democratic social change. Founded in 1932 by educator Myles Horton, the Highlander Folk School sought to address the economic and political problems facing communities in Appalachian Tennessee and other southern states. To this end Horton and the school's staff involved themselves in the labor and civil rights disputes that emerged across the south over the next three decades.

Drawing on the Highlander archives housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Avery Research Center in South Carolina, and the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, Stephen A. Schneider reconstructs the pedagogical theories and rhetorical practices developed and employed at Highlander. He shows how the school focused on developing forms of collective rhetorical action, helped students frame social problems as spurs to direct action, and situated education as an agency for organizing and mobilizing communities.

Schneider studies how Highlander's educational programs contributed to this broader goal of encouraging social action. Specifically he focuses on four of the school's more established programs: labor drama, labor journalism, citizenship education, and music. These programs not only taught social movement participants how to create plays, newspapers, citizenship schools, and songs, they also helped the participants frame the problems they faced as having solutions based in collective democratic action. Highlander's programs thereby functioned rhetorically, insofar as they provided students with the means to define and transform oppressive social and economic conditions. By providing students with the means to comprehend social problems and with the cultural agencies (theater, journalism, literacy, and music) to address these problems directly, Highlander provided an important model for understanding the relationships connecting education, rhetoric, and social change.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 3, 2014
ISBN9781611173826
You Can't Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961
Author

Stephen A. Schneider

Stephen A. Schneider is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville and the author of articles in College English and College Composition and Communication.

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    You Can't Padlock an Idea - Stephen A. Schneider

    Introduction

    The Highlander Folk School, Movement Halfway Houses, and Rhetorical Education

    On July 31, 1959, Tennessee District Attorney Albert Sloan led county and state law officers on a raid of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The group was ostensibly looking for liquor, which they eventually found during an illegal search of Highlander founder Myles Horton’s home. Four staff members, including civil rights activist Septima Clark and folk musician Guy Carawan, were arrested on trumped-up charges of possession of alcohol, public drunkenness, interfering with officers, and resisting arrest (Glen 1996, 232)*. On February 16, 1960, Circuit Court Judge Chester Chattin ordered that Highlander’s charter be revoked on the grounds that the school had been operated for Horton’s benefit, had sold liquor without a license, and had openly practiced racial integration (243). On October 9, 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Highlander’s appeal, ostensibly closing the school and bringing to an end a thirty-year experiment in education for social change.

    The Highlander Folk School had first opened as a residential adult education center in November 1932, with the goal of alleviating poverty conditions among Tennessee’s mountain poor. To this end, Highlander staff began a number of programs in the surrounding community of Summerfield, and further offered residential workshop sessions designed to build civic and political leaders. These workshops targeted the emergent southern labor movement, with the goal of building strong industrial unions and union leadership, and quickly led to extension programs devoted to crisis education. While the folk school’s union programs would continue into the 1940s and 1950s, staff members also began working with civil rights activists across the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Highlander’s civil rights programs—covering citizenship education, music, and community organization—brought the school renewed attention (and notoriety), and were in many ways some of the school’s most successful programs.

    The folk school’s work with southern labor, farmers, African Americans, and civil rights activists earned the school such a radical reputation that, even today, as John M. Glen points out, the name ‘Highlander’ rarely evokes a neutral response (1996, 1). The commitment of Highlander staff to community organization and social change attracted both loyal support and vicious condemnation. Among the individuals involved in establishing and supporting the school were John Dewey, Norman Thomas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. Chief among its opponents were J. Edgar Hoover, the Georgia Commission on Education, the Tennessee state legislature, and the Ku Klux Klan. Whether described as a heroic contributor to the southern labor and civil rights movements, or as a communist training school, Highlander’s unique contribution to the history of the American South is indisputable.

    Highlander’s reputation attests not only to the school’s commitment to social change, but also the rhetorical nature of Highlander’s work. The folk school’s educational programs not only helped oppressed communities recognize the transformative value of their own experiences and traditions but also to develop the various rhetorical strategies needed to agitate for social change. Highlander’s programs thus proved central to the construction of collective movement identities, and to the development and deployment of movement rhetorics. But on a more fundamental level, the rhetorical work undertaken at the school helped individuals to frame and mobilize their experiences as resources for social change.

    The pedagogical practices adopted at Highlander helped movement participants develop the rhetorical means to challenge oppressive social conditions. Specifically Highlander’s programs allowed individuals and communities to develop movement frames—both as the interpretive schemata that support movement activities and the rhetorical strategies developed from these schemata. The school’s pedagogy not only drew on the broader discourse of southern progressivism—defined by such topics as social justice, democracy, and equality—but also on the local cultural and political experiences of students. By sharing and critically examining these experiences, students learned to recognize the resources they already had available to solve their problems. By helping movement participants to frame their experiences in terms of justice and collective action, Highlander staff further helped them convert cultural resources into rhetorical strategies for seeking social change. The Highlander Folk School provides important evidence not only for the ways that rhetorical education contributed to the development of social movements in the United States, but also for the way that social movements—particularly movement halfway houses—contributed to the development of a nonformal tradition of rhetorical education.

    Myles Horton and the Highlander Idea

    It is difficult to understand both the origins and the contributions of the Highlander Folk School without understanding the social and economic milieus from which it emerged. Established in Southern Appalachia on the eve of the New Deal, Highlander represented an attempt to directly address the problems facing the region via progressive, nonformal adult education. Despite continued talk of a New South, much of the region still suffered the effects of both industrial exploitation and the Great Depression. But despite—and no doubt on account of—these problems, the South was also home to a number of progressive thinkers committed to democratic social change. It was to this social change that Highlander’s staff would dedicate themselves, and would in many ways define the school’s wider reputation.

    By the 1920s, southern states played host to several booming industries: textiles, cotton, tobacco, oil, lumber, paper, chemicals, steel, and aluminum. Mill and mine towns ostensibly promised jobs and better living conditions, and encouraged many southerners to move to industry centers. Nonetheless, the prosperity of the New South was far from evenly distributed. The South’s reliance on labor-intensive industry demanded that industrialists preserve their principal competitive advantage: low wages. The development of company villages in the textile and mining industries led not to prosperity but rather to exploitation, most notably through payment in company scrip that was good only at company stores. These stores in turn inflated prices so severely that scrip became known as robissary money (Tindall 1967, 329). Business owners worked to keep workers docile and wages cheap, principally through the sponsorship of open-shop associations and the exploitation of racial strife among workers. Despite positive events such as the establishment of the Southern Summer School for Women Workers in 1927, labor organizing in the South was uneven and typically ineffective.

    To say that labor organizing was ineffective is not to say that it was nonexistent. The 1920s saw the eruption of some of the bloodiest labor disputes in the region’s history: textile workers in Gastonia and Marion, North Carolina, struck during the spring and summer of 1929; rayon plants in Elizabethton, Tennessee, were shut down by walkouts during the same period; miners in Harlan and Bell counties, Kentucky, struck during 1931 and continued to protest working conditions through much of the following decade. These protests often resulted in the eviction of families from company-owned quarters, the looting of commissaries, and the use of company-hired deputies and National Guard contingents to break up pickets and maintain order. In the cases of Gastonia and Harlan, strike leaders, miners, and deputies were killed in gun battles or ambushes.

    Appalachian Tennessee, like many other areas in the South, faced problems of poverty, sharecropping, and absentee ownership of property and businesses. The lumber and coal (and with it, steel) industries exploited both the natural and human resources of the region, relying as much on cheap labor as they did on timber and coal. The representation of an isolated and backward Appalachia often served as a warrant for industrialization, as industry promised to bring progress to the southern mountains (Batteau 1990, 63). But such justifications hardly stemmed labor unrest in the region, which centered primarily on the coal industry in Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. While Harlan County was perhaps the most famous site for this unrest, similar disputes erupted in 1912 at Paint Creek and Cabin Creek, West Virginia, and in 1920–21 at Matewan, West Virginia. By the 1930s, Southern Appalachia had thus become a region caught between history and progress, represented both as a central part of the United States and as a challenge to a nation’s sense of itself.

    Roosevelt’s triumph in the 1932 presidential election brought with it new hope among southern progressives and those groups committed to challenging racism and Jim Crow. It should be noted that the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were all active in the South prior to the New Deal, challenging institutions such as the poll tax while pressing for the passage of federal antilynching laws. Spurred on by the New Deal and later by the emergence of popular-front politics, these groups would lay the foundation for such organizations as the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and the Southern Conference of Human Welfare (SCHW), organizations within which Highlander staff would play a significant role. When the SCHW secured the endorsement of the president and the First Lady in 1938, interracial cooperation in the South appeared to be a real possibility.

    It was into this South—the possibility of a New South—that the Highlander Folk School was born, and to which it hoped to contribute. From 1932 to 1961 Highlander staff would work with and contribute to the southern labor movement, farm-labor organizing efforts, and the civil rights movement. And while the success of Highlander’s programs was at best uneven (often for reasons beyond the control of school officials themselves), the educational theories and practices developed at the school have continued to animate discussions of education and social change even into the present. Central to most of these conversations is the Highlander Idea, the educational theory that animated much of Highlander’s work. Insofar as the Highlander Idea focuses not only on education as a vehicle for social change, but also on the need to focus such education on the immediate experiences of students themselves, it has come to stand both for a progressive pedagogical and a progressive political vision.

    While the Highlander Folk School was home to many different staff members during its first thirty years, the school is most closely associated with founder Myles Horton; and in most tellings of the school’s history, it is Horton who first defined the pedagogy that became known as the Highlander Idea. Horton was born in 1905 in Savannah, Tennessee, to parents whose political views in many ways reflected the commitment to association and social progress that came to define the Progressive Era (McGerr 2005, 66). Despite long periods of poverty, Horton’s parents ensured that he and his siblings received high-quality elementary and secondary education, which allowed Myles to attend Cumberland University from 1924 to 1928.

    Horton went to Cumberland intending to complete a major in English and some form of religious education; his extracurricular activities, however, would prove to have a greater impact on his thinking and his further plans. He openly supported John T. Scopes in the famous Tennessee evolution trial, and opposed the anti-union rhetoric of Cumberland trustee John E. Egerton (Glen 1996, 10–11). But it was his work as director of a Presbyterian Bible school in Ozone, Tennessee, in the summer of 1927, that first saw Horton working directly with the people and the problems of Southern Appalachia. Many workers in the area had been laid off, or had become physically unable to work, while farmers lived at bare subsistence levels. In the hopes of helping the community to address these problems, Horton called a meeting of the parents of the Bible school students and other interested adults (Horton 1990, 22). By encouraging those gathered to focus on their own life experiences, Horton helped the community to frame these experiences as problems to be solved, thereby forging a link between education and community action. When asked to stay on in the area as a teacher, Horton promised to return when he had more answers.

    Horton’s search for answers led him to travel far and wide over the subsequent years, first to Union Theological Seminary in New York, then to the University of Chicago. It was during these years that Horton would encounter many of the figures foundational to his thought: Harry Ward, George Counts, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Robert Park. At Union, Horton also met several of the people who would contribute to Highlander in its early years, including future staff members James Dombrowski, John Thompson, and Elizabeth Hawes. These classmates brought a similar commitment to social and economic justice to the school, and helped connect Highlander to progressive political forces in the South.

    Horton’s time in New York and Chicago also introduced him to the social gospel and the fields of sociology and adult education, all of which in turn helped Horton shape his radial commitment to democratic social change. It was arguably from the works of theologians Harry Ward and Reinhold Niebuhr that Horton first developed his conceptions of democracy and brotherhood, which he understood both as getting people organized so they have a voice and values having to do with human relations (Horton 1966, 11–12). Robert Park at the University of Chicago further provided Horton with a model of social development that suggested conflict was itself central to social progress, while adult educators such as Joseph K. Hart and Eduard Lindeman convinced him that education might further help to develop these progressive energies. For Horton, conflict presented an opportunity to dramatically frame social problems in terms of class, race, and exploitation. This also provided students with the means to establish collective identities and to seek direct solutions to the material conditions they faced. Horton thus combined the prophetic impetus he had drawn from the social gospel with a sociological program that emphasized education as a vehicle for social change. And although it would take several years for this pedagogical program to fully develop into what we now know as the Highlander Idea, its impact on both southern labor and civil rights activists is hard to overstate.

    As Horton’s pedagogical theories developed, he also began to look for an educational model upon which he might base an educational institution of his own. One of the first people he consulted was Hull House founder Jane Addams, who suggested that his educational project sounded like a rural settlement school (Glen 1996, 16). But it was his encounter in Chicago with Danish church ministers Aage Moller and Enok Mortensen that provided Horton with a clear model: the Danish folk school movement. Horton read all he could on Danish folk schools, and finally arranged to visit Denmark in hopes of investigating the schools for himself. Arriving in September 1931, Horton visited a number of folk schools and discussed with their leaders the underlying philosophies behind the movement. While he would come to question whether Denmark’s folk schools continued to live up to their original creed, Horton nonetheless saw in their structure a model for his own educational project.

    The Danish folk schools grew from the educational vision of Bishop Nikolai Grundtvig, widely considered one of the greatest Danish poets of the nineteenth century. Grundtvig proposed a School of Life, which would place adult education at the service of the Danish peasantry, and thereby help the latter to take up their role as preservers of the national culture. While Grundtvig had attempted to open a school of his own in 1844, the first successful folk school opened under the direction of educator Kristen Kold in 1851. The gains made by this first school encouraged other educators to found similar institutions, all devoted to linking education to the needs of local communities. These efforts proved essential to Denmark’s recovery from military defeat at the hands of Austria and Prussia in 1864, a defeat that deprived them of much of their best farming land. The folk schools were uniquely positioned to address the ensuing poverty and desperation, and thus focused their attention on agriculture and the development of cooperative business. By 1926 the folk schools had served over 300,000 students (Hart 1927).

    Myles Horton at Highlander. WHi-52643, Wisconsin Historical Society.

    The Danish folk schools provided Horton with an educational model that focused on the amelioration of community problems. For Horton, the success of this model grew directly from the folk-school concept of the Living Word, or the spoken word dealing with a vital subject (Horton 1944, 25). In most cases, this Living Word was a combination of an individual school’s purpose with primarily oral instruction methods. However, the young Horton felt that many of the schools no longer dealt effectively with the conditions faced by students. Many continued to rehearse the lessons offered to earlier generations, leading Horton to conclude that fighting the ghosts of one’s grandparents’ enemies does not call forth the ‘Living Word’ (25). For Horton—influenced by the pragmatism of Dewey and Lindeman—the concept of the Living Word had to be dialogic, involving teachers and students in vital discussion on those issues most urgent to them. More than lectures or academic analysis, the Living Word needed to be a response that came from students and their lives rather than from the teachers.

    Horton’s prophetic sensibilities, as well as his pragmatic commitment to reconstructing contemporary society along democratic lines, led him beyond older models of the Living Word to consider instead how this pedagogy might meet the pressing problems posed by industrialization. But if this pedagogy was to form the foundation for a successful school, then it would need to emerge from the immediate material conditions facing students and staff. This realization—one that Horton first had several years earlier in Ozone—would form the basis of the Highlander Idea, which focused first and foremost on using students’ own experiences as resources for social change. While Highlander staff would continue to develop and refine the idea throughout the school’s operation, it nonetheless lay at the heart of the school’s programs throughout its history. It is the Highlander Idea’s commitment to turning student experiences into political resources that most clearly suggests the rhetorical dimensions of the school’s work.

    Rhetorical Education and Movement Halfway Houses

    The Highlander Folk School provides scholars in rhetoric with important evidence for the contribution both of nonformal adult education and social movements to the development of rhetorical education in the United States. From the outset, Highlander staff attempted to encourage and mobilize the progressive energies found in the South before and during the New Deal era. More specifically Highlander functioned as a movement halfway house—a center for the development of movement resources and rhetorics—for both the southern labor and civil rights movements. While the school maintained an independent status that allowed it to preserve a semi-autonomous existence in relation to these movements, it nonetheless proved to be an important laboratory for fostering democratic social change in the South.

    By understanding Highlander as a site of rhetorical education, we gain a deeper appreciation of Highlander’s contributions to democratic social change, specifically the school’s work with labor and civil rights activists. Jessica Enoch has suggested that rhetorical education can be understood as "any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs (2008, 7–8). In this regard, we might think of the Highlander Idea as a contribution to what Cornel West has called a deep democratic paideia, or the critical cultivation of an active citizenry" (2005, 39). While Highlander staff never referred to their work in rhetorical terms, the programs they developed addressed the very civic concerns that Enoch suggests lie at the heart of rhetorical education. The staff worked to extend the rhetorical and political capacities of the students they worked with, and they undertook the civic work—albeit it in a more direct manner—often attributed to more traditional and formal approaches to rhetorical education.

    Historically, rhetorical education has been a means of achieving social change and furthering a broader democratic agenda. Nonformal adult education has made a contribution to this tradition. Both pragmatic and political in nature, nonformal adult education encompasses a variety of institutions and pedagogical programs, but insofar as these programs have typically dedicated themselves to community organization and betterment, they remain at least in part rhetorical in their missions. By 1932 a wide range of institutions represented the adult education movement: Jane Addams’s Hull House continued to be the flagship for the settlement-house movement; Brookwood Labor College, Commonwealth College, and the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers likewise served as leaders for an emerging network of labor colleges. While these various institutions had a variety of missions and goals, they all contributed to what they saw as the development of a democratic society. It was this emerging tradition that Myles Horton drew upon when founding his southern mountain school, and further contributed to as he developed the rhetorical dimensions of Highlander’s pedagogy.

    On one level, then, the rhetorical education undertaken at Highlander is easy to describe: Highlander staff helped oppressed communities and emerging social movements to recognize and develop available means of persuasion, specifically those devoted to effecting democratic social change. The model of rhetorical education developed at Highlander emerged primarily from the school’s residential and extension programs. These programs encouraged students to share their experiences as a means of discovering not only collective experiences of oppression, but also collective means of responding to that oppression. Myles Horton variously called this model a yeasty idea and a percolator theory of education—phrasings that suggest that Highlander staff hoped to encourage students to build upon their experiences in organic, self-directed ways (Eby 1953; Horton 1990). But both terms also make clear the folk school’s commitment to what Highlander staff member John Thompson calls the kairos of educational opportunity (1958). Within this framework, staff members worked to develop rhetorical strategies immanently from the experiences and resources that students themselves brought to residential workshops.

    While Highlander staff believed in the importance of starting where students already were, they were not necessarily neutral facilitators within workshops. Highlander classes were often organized thematically around topics such as contract negotiation, grievance process, and labor journalism, and staff took an active role in helping students utilize their experience within these different areas. Staff also used a variety of cultural traditions—specifically labor drama, journalism, literacy education, and folk music—as a means of helping students shape their experiences into effective rhetorical strategies for achieving social change. Drama became a means of fostering collective action and communicating workers’ experiences with strikes, pickets, exploitative bosses, and labor spies. Labor journalism allowed students to effectively organize union locals and to craft a corpus of movement documents from which workers could build collective identities. Within the civil rights movement, literacy education would prove to be an agency for community organization and rhetorical education in its own right. And finally, in both the southern labor and civil rights movements, music would provide activists with an important agency for fostering morale and for directly resisting the violent responses their activities provoked. Following sociologist Aldon Morris, we might conclude that the combination of student experience with rhetorical agencies such as drama, journalism, and music helped workshop participants transform indigenous resources into power resources (1984, xii).

    In The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Morris coins the term movement halfway house to describe the function of institutions such as Highlander within broader campaigns for social change. For Morris, halfway houses are organizations that are only partially integrated into the larger society because [their] participants are actively involved in efforts to bring about a desired change in society (1984, 139). Despite their inability to affect wide-scale change on their own, movement halfway houses nonetheless develop a battery of social change resources such as skilled activists, tactical knowledge, media contacts, workshops, knowledge of past movements, and a vision of a future society (140). Emerging social movements provide these halfway houses with a wide audience, who in turn profit from the resources that the halfway houses make available.

    Francesca Polletta argues that halfway houses are important to social movements not only for their resources, but also for the experience that they provide movement participants in collective decision-making and democratic living (2002, 64–65). These organizations thereby serve as active examples of the sorts of communities that social movements hope to build. Polletta also emphasizes the links between labor colleges and union education programs in the 1930s, and the organizational strategies of the civil rights movement (28). Not only were the pedagogies used by early union education programs and civil rights organizations similar in many ways; in many cases organizers trained in union programs were active leaders within the civil rights movement.

    But movement halfway houses, beyond supplying resources and models for democratic community-building, also play an important role in the rhetorical development of social movements. For Shirley Wilson Logan, such sites represent spaces where people and language and a need to communicate come together to create what Lloyd Bitzer calls a rhetorical situation (2008, 3). Movement halfway houses proved to be instrumental in helping emerging social movements to recognize and develop the symbolic resources necessary for sustaining political action. This role consists not only in managing more familiar rhetorical enterprises, such as publicity and media response, but also in developing the rhetorical agencies through which movements make their claims. Morris has argued that these strategies are essential if movements are to appropriately deploy indigenous resources—cultural, economic, and political stocks already available within local communities—and thereby attract wider support (1984, 282–83). It is within this context that learning about rhetoric occurs (Logan 2008, 3). As Highlander provided a space for labor and civil rights activists to pursue democratic social change, so too it operated as a site for rhetorical education.

    The pedagogical dimensions of Highlander’s work—arguably rhetorical, but not necessarily persuasive in the conventional sense of that term—can be understood by

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