If America has its
socialist movement to thank for its Pledge of Allegiance and its flag cult, so
too do Protestant churches in both America and Great Britain have their
respective socialist movements to thank for the existence of Sunday School.
The Socialist Sunday School movement began in the same place as the original Sunday schools, on the island of Great Britain. The latter began in early 19th century as places of educational instruction for children of working class parents, many of whom themselves worked six days a week alongside their fathers and mothers. It then spread to the U.S. After the increase in availability of public education, the Sunday schools, here and in the United Kingdom, became more strictly religious.
In 1892, Mary Gray
of the London chapter of the Social Democratic Federation began the first
Socialist Sunday School after serving on the line of a soup kitchen during a
dock workers strike that year. She
started it to give the children a basic education and to teach them important socialist
values. From there, it spread to the
rest of the United Kingdom and eventually crossed the pond to America.
In order to counter
the chauvinistic political indoctrination in public schools increasingly
conservative churches during the Progressive Era, the Socialist Party of
America (SPA) organized Socialist Sunday Schools wherever it had chapters of
its Young People’s Socialist League. The
party’s literary and collegiate arm, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society
(ISS), provided most of the oversight.
The brainchild of
Upton Sinclair, the ISS was co-founded by him, Jack London, Clarence Darrow,
Walter Lippman, Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Norman Thomas,
Harry Laidler, Florence Kelley, Jack Reed, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, B.O.
Flower, abolitionist hero Thomas Wentworth Higginson, J. Graham Phelps Stokes,
and Owen R. Lovejoy. London was elected
president and Sinclair first vice president.
In 1921, the society
changed its name to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), and established
a youth wing in 1930, the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). The SLID changed its name in 1958 to Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was to become one of the key
organizations of the New Left movement in the 1960’s.
The purpose of the
SPA’s Socialist Sunday Schools was “to contest more directly the overly
individualistic, competitive, nationalistic, militaristic themes prevalent in
contemporary public schools and other social institutions, and help in supplanting
capitalist social and economic relations with a more equitable and cooperative
form.”*
The schools had
strong support from the highest ranks of the party, including Eugene Debs. They
had their own textbooks, their own songbooks, even their own Socialist Ten
Commandments for the children to memorize:
1. Love your school companions, who will be your
co-workers in life.
2. Love learning, which is the food of the mind;
be as grateful to your teachers as to your parents.
3. Make every day holy by good and useful deeds
and kindly actions.
4. Honour good men and women; be courteous to
all; bow down to none.
5. Do not hate or speak evil of any one; do not
be revengeful, but stand up for your rights and resist oppression.
6. Do not be cowardly. Be a good friend to the
weak, and love justice.
7. Remember that all good things of the earth
are produced by labour. Whoever enjoys them without working for them is
stealing the bread of the workers.
8. Observe and think in order to discover the
truth. Do not believe what is contrary to reason, and never deceive yourself or
others.
9. Do not think that they who love their own
country must hate and despise other nations, or wish for war, which is a
remnant of barbarism.
10. Look forward to the day when all men and
women will be free citizens of one community, and live together as equals in
peace and righteousness.
These were composed in England, perhaps by Comrade Gray
herself, and they spread west to America along with the Socialist Sunday School
movement.
From 1900 to 1920, the heyday of the American socialist
movement, there were some one hundred Socialist Sunday Schools in sixty-four
cities and towns across the nation.
In their homeland on the island of Great Britain, there were
some 200 Socialist Sunday Schools in England and Scotland, and the movement
lasted to the latter half of the 1920’s.
*quote from Kenneth Teitelbaum's Schooling for “Good Rebels”: Socialist Education for Children in the
United States, 1900-1920, published 1993.
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