User:Czar/drafts/Ferrer Center

In 1909, the free-thinker, pedagogue, and anarchist Francisco Ferrer was executed in Barcelona and subsequently propelled into martyrdom. The resulting Ferrer movement led to the founding of anticlerical private schools in the model of his Escuela Moderna throughout the world. One such school was founded in New York.

On June 12, 1910, a group of 22 anarchists and sympathizers began the Francisco Ferrer Association in New York City. Together they built a "cultural center and evening school", which expanded into an "experimental day school" and, ultimately, a colony outside New Brunswick, New Jersey. The association lasted over 40 years. The Association had three goals: to promote Ferrer's writings, to organize meetings on the anniversary of his death, and to establish schools by his model throughout the United States. Outside the United States, the Americans had no explicit connection with international Ferrer groups.

The Association's headquarters, the Ferrer Center, hosted a variety of cultural events: literary lectures, debates on current affairs, avant-garde arts and performance, social dances, and classes for the inquisitive masses. Though many of its teachers were hostile to formal academic manner, classes addressed standard subjects. Some were taught by distinguished individuals: painters Robert Henri and George Bellows taught figure drawing, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's son taught comparative literature, Robert La Follette's law partner taught government, and Will Durant taught the history of philosophy. The Center held an evening English class, whose topics often included proletarian history and current affairs. One group studied Esperanto. Lectures discussed free thought, religion, sex, and hygiene. Margaret Sanger proposed mothers' meetings on birth control. On the weekends, the Center hosted speakers for discussion including journalist Hutchins Hapgood, poet Edwin Markham, and reporter Lincoln Steffens. A lecture by lawyer Clarence Darrow attracted hundreds. Others associated with the Center included Max Weber, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

The Center's radical politics made it a haven for anti-capitalist revolutionaries, anarchists, and libertarians. It hosted children from the 1912 Lawrence textile strike, supported Frank Tannenbaum's 1914 mobilization of the unemployed, and fed protesters.

The folklorist Moritz Jagendorf started a "Free Theatre" at the Center in late 1914. The group performed new manuscripts, including a world premiere of a Lord Dunsany drama, as well as their own original plays, which had social themes. The theater had a very limited budget and some of its performers struggled to speak English. They also hosted Floyd Dell's troupe and others from Greenwich Village.

Demographically, the Center had an air of cosmopolitanism from the range of nationalities represented by its participants, though Jews formed the Center's largest base. By 1914, the group's adult membership was in the hundreds.

Several anarchists from the association decided to take the school out to the country.

The Center served as a model for schools across the United States in Chicago, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Seattle. But while these schools mostly closed within several years, the schools in Stelton and Mohegan would last for decades.