American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was founded in April 1916. Although local teacher associations had been started as early as in the 1890s, and while some local associations had affiliated directly with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the AFT was founded as a national teachers union, affiliated with the AFL, and has remained so since its founding. As in most labor unions, however, the local organization is the most important factor in the lives of members. It was three different local associations in Chicago, Illinois, and the local organization in Gary, Indiana, that united to form the AFT, though the local organization in New York City quickly became prominent alongside of its midwestern peers.

The post–World War I period was a time of optimism and increasing organizing for the AFL, the parent of the AFT, as it sought to build on organizational gains made initially in wartime when government and employers needed the cooperation of the working people and feared the negative impact of strikes and other labor unrest on the war effort.

The 1920s proved to be the antithesis of the postwar years, and the AFT and the AFL suffered membership losses as business and employers reigned supreme in a time of economic boom. Fueled by anti-union devices such as the “open shop” and the “American plan,” employers and the government put organized labor on the defensive until 1920. The Great Depression of the 1930s meant a sharp falloff in the influence of business and AFT. During the Depression, the AFL and then the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)—a federation of industrial unions formed when the craft-oriented AFL looked askance at organizing less-skilled industrial workers—prospered. A few teacher locals affiliated with the CIO and many AFT locals prospered during the Depression, at the same time that teachers suffered economically, though not often losing their jobs.

From its beginnings, the AFT was in conflict over whether or not it was to be primarily a federation of local groups that stood mainly for material improvements in salaries and working conditions for teachers or one that also advocated for changes in educational conditions that would lead to more effective schools and social and political changes that would facilitate educational improvement. Generally, the working conditions approach was stressed in most locals, but famous locals such as the Chicago Teachers' Federation, led by the noted progressive and woman suffragist Margaret Haley, had other ideas. Also active in the early AFT was the noted progressive educator and philosopher John Dewey, who enthusiastically joined the AFT and tried to push it into the ranks [Page 57]of educational reformers. As this was happening, however, the AFT was led at the national level by a group of Chicago unionists mainly in the high schools, antagonists of Margaret Haley, who believed strongly in a more conservative approach that emphasized teacher welfare and status maintenance for teachers.

The dispute between bread-and-butter unionism on the one hand, and political, social, and educational reform unionism on the other, came to a head during the 1930s. In the middle of that decade, socialists and a few communists held sway in the New York local of the AFT and nearly took over the national organization. In the early 1940s, however, under the leadership of new president George S. Counts, the AFT moved to disaffiliate locals it considered to be communist dominated. Communist locals were successfully tarred as tools of the Soviet Union, but they also had a record of seeking a variety of reforms in the areas of race relations in the union and the public schools, as well as in the larger political arena.

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