Labor had pursued a highly conservative, pro-business, craft union approach to labor policy. It aligned itself with the pro-business National Civic Federation; largely excluded African Americans, women, and immigrants from its unions; and through the craft union system largely and purposefully excluded most workers from the benefits of union protection. Brookwood's assumption that a new social order was not only needed but was quickly coming conflicted directly with the vision of the AFL. The AFL was not opposed to worker education, however. Indeed, it sought to use worker education for its own purposes. To improve communication among worker education units of labor unions and independent labor colleges, James Maurer, John Brophy, and J. B. S. Hardman co-founded the Workers' Education Bureau (WEB) on December 31, 1921. Their goal was to reform and liberalize the labor policies of the AFL, popularize the emerging concept of industrial unionism, and instill a greater sense of militancy in the worker-members of the AFL. Maurer was elected president of the WEB. AFL policy was to subvert the WEB. William Green, then the AFL's Secretary-Treasurer, was personally hostile toward the organization. In 1922, Green began implementing a plan to "burrow from within" and turn the WEB to the AFL's purposes. That same year, the AFL convention approved a cooperative agreement between the WEB and AFL, and in 1924 the AFL asked each of its members unions to contribute 0.5 percent of its annual income to the WEB. As conservative AFL unions began to join the WEB, the organization began shifting away from its progressive policy stands. In 1925, WEB revised its constitution to deny membership to the New York Workers School, the Work People's College, the Rand School of Social Science, and other labor colleges outside the traditional union and AFL structure. In 1926, the AFL recommended that unions double their spending on adult education, and by the end of the year more than 500 international and local AFL unions were affiliated with the WEB. By 1927, Green's plan of "burrowing from within" had succeeded, and a majority of the WEB's board of directors were conservative AFL labor union leaders. That year, the WEB had adopted resolutions and constitutional amendments that essentially prevented it from concerning itself "in any way with trade union politicies" and required it to function "strictly as an educational and research organization". The WEB's new goal was to educate workers so they