Of all the professors and teachers purged or investigated during the Red Scare, not one was ever accused of incompetence in the classroom, nor was any credible evidence presented that they propagandized their students. The majority of the purged were highly honored instructors, and invariably it was acknowledged that they left their politics at the campus gates. The sad fact is that American educators have always been targeted by suspicion during a national fit of patriotism—not for their classroom conduct, but for their beliefs and associations.
During World War One, more than twenty professors suspected of pacifism or pro-German sentiment were fired. Between 1917 and 1923, thirteen states leveled charges of disloyalty against teachers. By 1940, twenty-one states required teachers to swear their loyalty annually; by 1952, the number was up to thirty-three. But the intrusions of the postwar Red Scare quickly went beyond loyalty oaths. Nearly twenty states banned teachers from membership in a vast catalog of progressive organizations. State and federal investigators and private vigilantes competed to expose the “Red-ucators.” In 1949, HUAC demanded from eighty-one colleges and high schools lists of textbooks used in literature, economics, government, history, political science, social science, and geography. The Department of Defense clamored to investigate the entire curricula of two hundred universities engaged in military research. Administrators on all levels of education carried out independent purges. Colleagues informed on colleagues, students on their teachers. Abandoned by their institutions, professional associations, and nearly all unions, targeted teachers faced years on the blacklist, exile, sporadic violence, and prison.
The first assault against higher education was aimed not at the faculty but at the students. During the Popular Front years of the late 1930s, the nation’s campuses had been a ferment of radical activity. With the end of World War Two, many left-wing veterans returned to academia and picked up where they had left off. The brief flowering that ensued was nothing like that of the prewar era, but it was significant. Nearly all major public and private universities and colleges had some form of student Left.
From the start, campus administrators were hostile toward their youthful activists, but the advent of Truman’s loyalty program in 1947 encouraged a wide purge. Pressured by investigating committees and their own trustees, universities and colleges revoked the charters of the American Youth for Democracy (AYD), the American Veterans Committee (the Left’s answer to the American Legion), the Young Progressives, and the Labor Youth League, as well as a flurry of local Marxist study groups. An alternative expedient, and far more popular, was to demand of the suspect organizations a full membership list that would be available to government investigators. This method came recommended by HUAC and in many cases prompted a quick disbanding. At the same time, restrictions on outside speakers intensified. All Communists were barred, including novelist Howard Fast and singer Paul Robeson, along with almost anyone left of center. In banning the appearance of a Communist philosophy professor, the president of Wayne University explained, “It is now clear that the Communist is to be regarded . . . as an enemy of our national welfare.” By 1950, student radicalism was all but extinct on American campuses, and would not be revived for another decade.
Faculty radicals kept a lower profile. Even in the 1930s they had been much less in evidence than their student counterparts. After World War Two, they simply did not exist in any organized form. Many had disengaged from the CP and, with the exception of the Wallace campaign, had given up much of their political activities, especially on campus. Those who were still in the Party affiliated with community groups rather than academic ones. This, however, did not make them immune. With the catalyst of the Truman program transforming the CP into a national threat, pressure mounted to rid the nation of politically undesirable teachers.
The first shot of the campaign was fired in Seattle. In July 1948, the Canwell Committee, Washington’s little HUAC, announced an investigation into the Communist infiltration of the University of Washington: “There isn’t a student who has attended this university who has not been taught subversive activities.” The University’s board of regents welcomed the intrusion and promised to cooperate fully. President Raymond Allen had warned the faculty the previous December that any Communists should get out “before they [are] smoked out.” Eleven professors, all tenured, were subpoenaed. The ensuing circus became the model for the national purge that followed.
Professional ex-Communists testified at length on CP plans to overthrow the government by force, violence, and subterfuge. Local informers provided the same service for the Seattle Left and linked the academics to its nefarious activities. Of the eleven, two denied they had ever been in the Party; one talked of his short period of membership and named names; another couldn’t remember any names; four admitted past membership but declined to inform; the remaining three refused to answer any questions about their politics or associates and were promptly cited for contempt.
Now came the university’s turn. Six of the eleven were put on trial by the academic tenure committee. Even though the committee finally recommended that all six be retained, three were fired at the insistence of President Allen. Allen then set himself up as an anti-Communist expert and spread the gospel of the new logic: the Communists themselves endangered academic freedom by submitting to the mind control of the Kremlin. The well-respected teachers were now “incompetent, intellectually dis-honest, and derelict in their duty to find and teach the truth.”
Cornell, the universities of Michigan and Minnesota, Harvard, and Yale rushed to follow suit, depicting CP members as “fanatics” who habitually resorted to “deceit and treachery.” Wallace Sterling of Stanford doubted Communists were capable of being “free agents” and held that they were “by definition precluded from being an educator.” Also precluded was anyone who resorted to the Fifth Amendment before an investigating committee. Rutgers ruled that reliance on this particular constitutional protection was “incompatible with the standards required” of the academic community.
The most damaging encounter began in 1949 when the regents of the University of California voted to impose a private oath on its faculty. Those who had not signed by the last day of April 1950 would be summarily fired. With the principled refusal of some three hundred senior faculty, the controversy achieved national prominence. Moral support and money poured in from sympathetic faculty at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Princeton. Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer publicly urged resistance to the oath. Sixty-two recalcitrant members of the academic senate were tried by the committee on privilege and tenure. Six were immediately fired, and the remainder were released upon termination of their contracts. By 1951, the UC system had lost 110 scholars—twenty-six fired, thirty-seven who resigned in protest, and forty-seven others who had refused appointments. In that one year, fifty-five regular courses had to be dropped.
By this time, the FBI had permeated American campuses. Whenever a student applied for federal employment, an agent interrogated his professors and checked for his name on the membership lists of liberal campus organizations. The dean of the Columbia School of Journalism complained that agents from the FBI, CIA, and civil service were “following up leads like prosecuting attorneys.” At Princeton, government agents demanded to read student term papers. A national organization of former FBI agents established campus chapters that reported suspicious activities back to headquarters. In June 1952, twenty-eight California colleges and universities, including Stanford and the UC system, agreed to collaborate with the state’s Un-American Activities Committee and to install an ex-agent responsible only to the committee on each campus.
The end result was widespread intimidation and fear. The academics who had not been fired fretted over when and how they might be. The University of Wyoming undertook a complete search of its textbooks for subversive or un-American material. Controversial topics were avoided in classrooms, syllabi were pruned, scholars now celebrated the status quo. A poll conducted in 1955 of 2,451 teachers in 165 colleges revealed that 84 percent were worried not of being accused of Party membership or of having to take the Fifth, but of being tagged as “subversive” or “un-American.” The fear of recommending radical reading material was as high as the fear of student informers.
The purge not only blighted lives but took them. Harvard’s beleaguered literary critic F. O. Matthiessen jumped from a hotel window in 1950. Stanford biochemist William Sherwood took poison and killed himself before his HUAC appearance in 1957. Another academic suicide was a professor tortured over his decision to inform. In 1961, an anti-Communist fanatic burst into the Berkeley offices of Thomas Parkinson, a Yeats scholar and alleged Communist, shot him point-blank in the face, then killed his teaching assistant, Stephen Thomas.
An alternative system of higher education also came under attack. These were the labor schools, a dozen or so fully accredited institutions1 that provided a free education in a wide variety of disciplines for anyone who cared to partake. They offered technical job-related courses and a chance at college life that many Americans missed because of the Depression and the war. Returning veterans flocked to the labor schools on the GI Bill. In music, art, literature, and drama classes, longshoremen and ship scalers, fresh from the dirtiest work on the docks, sat next to office clerks and women in furs.
The majority of teachers worked without salary, and volunteered from industry, labor, and neighboring universities. Among the many guest lecturers were architect Frank Lloyd Wright, poet Muriel Rukeyser, journalist Eric Severeid, and actor Orson Welles. Utilizing the talents of the Hollywood Left, the People’s Educational Center of Los Angeles was the first school to offer a comprehensive course in film studies and technology. By 1946 the attendance of the California Labor School had risen to 2,600 students a semester, spread through seventy different course offerings. In the same year, the Jefferson School serviced nearly ten thousand students a year.
From the beginning of the movement in the mid-1930s, the Communist Party played a major role in the organization and funding of the schools, along with AFL and CIO unions, private foundations, wealthy businessmen, and philanthropists. But from the start of Truman’s Red Scare the schools fell under constant attack. The Justice Department listed them as “subversive organizations.” HUAC pronounced them “schools of Communist indoctrination.” The attack was joined by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, the Subversive Activities Control Board, and the IRS, which revoked the schools’ nonprofit standing and demanded large sums in back taxes. Teachers and administrators were grilled before the committees and hit with contempt citations. Funding dropped off—non-Communist unions were scared away and the pro-Communist unions had their own defense campaigns to fund; foundations and private donors disappeared. More than one labor school was padlocked by court order. By the late 1950s, virtually every labor school had been destroyed.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS
The attacks against public school teachers were nationwide, but the hardest-hit locations were metropolitan California, Philadelphia, and New York City, the three largest pockets of radicalism in the teaching profession.
The Los Angeles board of education followed the same rule as its New York counterpart: automatic dismissal for any teacher invoking the Fifth Amendment. To cover any loopholes, the Dilworth Act of 1953 mandated instant dismissal of any public employee who refused to testify about CP membership during the period since September 1948. With the passage of the Luckel Act in the same year, the state board of education and every local school board were conferred investigatory powers. The state Un-American Activities Committee and the state senate’s Investigating Committee on Education, aided by the Sons of the American Revolution, centered their attentions on the Los Angeles area.
Alarmed, the superintendent of schools announced that every teacher would be required to read a pamphlet on Americanism and sign a loyalty oath. He also encouraged all citizens and parents to report any instances of subversive teaching. The board of education then turned over the entire roster of thirty thousand employees to the chief counsel of the Burns Committee, with the result that more two hundred teachers were either fired or refused appointment.
From 1946 to 1960, California schoolteachers faced at least nine major investigations by state or federal inquisitors, hundreds of teachers were named as subversives, and scores were fired.
Teachers in Philadelphia were harassed by school superintendent Louis Hoyer, who put thirty-two teachers on trial before the board of education for taking the Fifth or refusing to answer his questions. Twenty-six were fired for “incompetence.” HUAC visited the City of Brotherly Love three times between 1952 and 1954 and raked forty-one teachers over the coals, thirty-six of whom took the Fifth.
In New York the 1949 Feinberg Law placed a security officer in each school district, whose job it was to file an annual report on the politics of every employee. Membership in subversive organizations automatically dis-qualified teachers for employment. Past Party membership was considered conclusive of present membership, unless proved otherwise. The burden of proof, of course, rested with the teacher. This was rapidly augmented in 1950 by a state supreme court ruling that allowed the board of education to fire teachers who refused to answer questions posed by congressional committees.
The main target was Local 55 of the Teachers Union of New York. Not only was the TU affiliated with the United Public Workers of America, CIO, but it supported the Wallace campaign and tirelessly criticized the board of education for its failure to integrate the city’s school and for its tolerance of prejudiced teachers and textbooks. Beginning in 1946, the TU was under attack from the board of education, the Catholic Church, and the House Committee on Education and Labor.
That same year, the superintendent of schools sent a trio of investigators on a surprise visit to a school on Staten Island, where they interrogated TU activist Minnie Gutride about political meetings she allegedly attended in 1940 and 1941. When the startled woman asked to consult a lawyer, they threatened her with a charge of conduct unbecoming a teacher. That after-noon she dropped by the TU office for advice; that night she committed suicide. She had lived alone since the death of her husband in the Spanish Civil War. In 1950, the president and secretary of the TU, along with five other teachers, were summarily suspended without pay. When the SISS came to town in 1952, the entire union leadership was subpoenaed; all took the Fifth, and all were fired from their teaching positions.
In early 1952, the notorious informer Harvey Matusow was hired by the board of education as a consultant in the arduous task of ferreting out the heretics. He was given a tour of the superintendent’s interrogation room, complete with a two-way mirror, where suspected teachers were grilled on their reading habits, their acquaintances, their feelings about Spain, their voting patterns, and what petitions they had ever signed. With Harvey’s help, fourteen more teachers were put on the streets.
New avenues of dismissal came in 1955, when the board of education ruled that teachers must inform on their colleagues when ordered to do so by the superintendent. Forty teachers who had previously refused were pressed again to execute the ignoble service: thirty-five submitted, the remaining five were fired. The board also took pains to publish the names and addresses of all suspended teachers—not only would they be unemployed (and unemployable), they would also suffer round-the-clock harassment and threats.
Not until 1961 was this vicious board thrown out by the state legislature. Three years later, the TU, with its treasury defunct and its membership depleted, voted to disband. In November 1973, after a long court battle, thirty-one teachers, waiving any claim to back pay, had their pension rights restored—but only on the basis of the much lower salaries prevailing twenty years previously.
More than twelve hundred college and university professors were investigated, with more than 330 forced to resign or fired, many of them blacklisted. At least seven were indicted for contempt of Congress, and at least four served time in prison. Three professors committed suicide. One graduate student was murdered.
In the public schools, at least sixty thousand teachers fell under some form of investigative scrutiny. More than five hundred were forced to resign or were fired and blacklisted. At least one committed suicide.
Universities
The recipient of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the International Lenin Peace Prize, Linus Pauling came under fire for his stand against the arms race and circulating a peace petition to the scientists of fifty nations. The work that brought him international acclaim also earned him the enmity of his government and of the board of trustees at Caltech. We meet at his research institute near Stanford University. Gimlet-eyed in his early nineties, he sports a beret atop a halo of white hair. (For more on Linus Pauling, see under “The Peace Movement.”)
I was never a part of the University of California system, so I didn’t have to deal with the loyalty oath. But I sent a letter to the governor protesting it, and I was hauled before the California State Committee on Education in Los Angeles. They asked me, “Are you a Communist? Did you send a protest letter to the governor?” “Yes, surely I did. I don’t think an oath is a proper criterion. I don’t think people should be required to sign them.” Then, again, “Are you a Communist?” “I refuse to answer.”
I was asked—probably subpoened, I’m not sure—to return in front of the committee the following week in Pasadena. Some people at the Institute said, “President Du Bridge1 might be put on the hot spot about this matter. You’ve refused to answer the question as to whether you’re a Communist or not.” I said, “Everybody knows I’m not a Communist, but I don’t like these people in authority asking me questions of that sort.” Someone suggested, “Why don’t you write a letter to President Du Bridge explaining your situation; that you object to being forced to answer questions about your beliefs, but you don’t mind telling him or any other person that you feel like telling that you’re not a Communist and never have been; you’re not even a theoretical Marxist and actually not much interested in these questions?” So I did.
Then I had to reappear before this committee. The chairman said, “Now I ask you again the question: are you a Communist?”
“I refuse to answer the question—not on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment or the First Amendment—I’m just not willing to answer the question about my beliefs.”
So he said, “Do you recognize this document?”
“No. What is it?”
“It’s a letter that you sent to President Du Bridge. Are the statements in this letter true?”
“Yes, of course. I wouldn’t write statements that aren’t true.” [Laughs.]
He and the members of his committee fiddled around awhile and then he said, “Well, you’re dismissed. That’s all.” And I left. When I was going out, I heard one of the members of the committee say, “All that I know is that he’s made a monkey out of this committee.” [Laughs.]
I was one of the earliest Guggenheim Fellows, and I’d been a member of their committee of selection for about ten years. When the foundations were attacked, they dropped me from the list of members.
I was also denied grant money by HEW.2 I phoned someone at NIH that I had contact with and said, “I don’t understand. I received this telegram saying, ‘Despite the letter that you received two months ago assuring you of a grant, it has been canceled.’ ” I asked why. He didn’t really answer. Finally he said, “Well, here’s a suggestion. This grant was supposed to cover several different fields of work under your general direction. Why don’t you divide it up—you apply for a grant to support some of the work and have your different colleagues apply for separate grants under their names?” So we did. Mine was never accepted, but the other two were, and I eventually got all the monies that I had originally asked for. I was fortunate in that way. I met a man from Columbia whose grant had been canceled. He was just despondent. The university wasn’t going to give him money for this work, and he couldn’t do what I had done, couldn’t use somebody else’s name. Some were badly hit.
I found out that the board of trustees at Caltech had set up a committee to look into the possibility of firing me. The committee reported that they couldn’t fire me, that I hadn’t been guilty of moral turpitude. In 1957, I was asked in to see the president. He told me, “We’re losing millions of dollars from donors because the Institute hasn’t fired you, and one of the members of the board of trustees has resigned. I’m sorry that we can’t fire you, but I can remove you as chairman of the board of trustees of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering.” I had held the position for twenty-two years.
I said, “Fine. You know, I said to you a couple of years ago that I thought I’d been chairman of that division long enough. So why don’t I just resign, with a decrease in salary?” And I did.
Then they told me that I would have to give up my main research projects. That they needed the space for younger members. I was still some years away from retirement age. I decided then that the time had come for me to leave the Institute, and I began looking around for another job. Then I received the word that I’d been given the Nobel Peace Prize. I was at our home at Salmon Creek. A couple of days later we went down to Pasadena. I saw the Los Angeles Times, there was an article about my getting the Nobel Peace Prize. And the president of the Institute said, “It’s very remarkable that a person should get a second Nobel Prize, but there’s much difference of opinion about the value of the work that Professor Pauling has been doing.” Two weeks later, I announced that I was resigning from Caltech.
Linus Pauling died on August 20, 1994, at the age of ninety-three.
Oscar Shaftel was fired from Queens College in 1954 for refusing to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. After a decade on the blacklist, he returned to teaching in 1964; he is a professor emeritus at both Pratt Institute and Queens College. We meet in an upper gallery of the New York City Public Library. He speaks easily, well prepared to tell the tale.
In the late forties, the Cold War began; early fifties, the investigations began. You get a crazy dogfight between McCarthy’s committee, the Un-American Activities Committee, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, all trying to get their investigative show on the road first. In October 1952, the Senate Internal Security Committee sent two senators and staff people to New York.
I’d taught at Queens College since the college opened in ’37. I had tenure. I had served in the military from ’42 to ’46, came back, and was promoted to assistant professor. I was also active in the College Teachers Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, and served as chairman of the Queens chapter for several years.
When the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee came to New York, they got lists of names of union people and leftists who would probably refuse to answer the direct question. They checked the letterhead of the College Teachers Union. It listed the vice president for each branch of City College—Hunter, Queens, Brooklyn—and committee heads. They simply subpoenaed everybody on the list. I had stepped down as the chairman of the Queens College chapter, but the current chairman was a dear friend of mine, Vera Shlakman, a professor of economics.
Vera was subpoenaed on a Monday. On Tuesday, the students called a protest meeting. I spoke there and got a subpoena on Thursday. Simple as that. A bunch of us were called and were ordered to show up at the Judicial Building downtown on Columbus Day. There were people from schools all over New York. It was amazing, all of these people who had turned up to be fired on Columbus Day.
They ran out of time before I had to testify. So I continued teaching into the next semester with this ax hanging over my head.
Of course, they wanted only one thing. No questions about education theory or practice—all they asked was “Are you or have you ever been . . . ?” If you say no, they had lists of perjuring accusers and you could go to jail for perjury. If you say yes, then the next question is “Name everybody you know you ever attended a meeting with.” Some tried to say, “I was, but I’m not any longer.” Then it’s a question of naming all the people you knew back then. You were stuck with the Fifth Amendment, and that’s what they were trying to get in the first place. The Fifth Amendment always smells bad in public press. Then you get fired, because most of the colleges, either by fiat of the president or the board of trustees’ rules, said anybody who pleads the Fifth Amendment is not worthy of teaching.
In New York City, there was a resolution dating back to the Tin Box graft days and the Seabury investigation1 in the thirties. This was when public officials had cash boxes in their desks full of one-hundred-dollar bills and would refuse to say where it came from. The college trustees passed a resolution—Section 903—saying you had to cooperate with any duly constituted committee investigating the business of New York City. The federal people knew that this was enforced, and they used this gimmick to their full advantage. If you pleaded the Fifth Amendment, they could get you on Section 903 for refusing the cooperate. That’s what hit my group.
A couple months later, early February 1953, I got a telegram from the committee which said, “Report in Washington on Monday, February 9, for a hearing.” About a half-dozen of us went down at that time. We were what they called unfriendly witnesses. This was the first headlines they’d had since October. On Tuesday, February 10, they had the great big show with TV in the caucus room of the Senate, jamful.
They called me first. I was on the stand for an hour. There are about thirty pages of testimony, with me arguing and answering questions on why I wouldn’t give an answer. First I tried to explain what the principles of a free education were. But the five senators were naive. Instead of simply shutting me up immediately, they argued back. They were trying to get publicity for themselves. Finally, they pinned me into a corner and said, “Answer the question. Are you or have you ever been . . . ?” I said, “I plead the First, the Seventh, the Fourteenth, and the Fifth.” One of them was dumb enough to say, “We don’t recognize the First Amendment in this committee.” [Laughs.] There were some low-grade individuals in the U.S. Senate, a couple of drunks and characters with no dignity. They had no objective except to keep it going. Doing their dirty job with a perfectly straight face.
I had to wait a week for the transcript to come down from Washington. Then I was called into the president’s office and suspended. I wrote a letter of protest to the president of Queens2 at the time, a rather low-grade character. I won’t ask you to censor that, he was low-grade. My case then went on the agenda of the board of higher education to be changed from a suspension into a discharge. I was fired within two months of the hearing.
They didn’t discharge me for cause. They simply left the line blank and said there was no more job. You have to understand that very few people were fired for being Communists. You were fired for Section 903, not cooperating with a duly constituted investigating committee. This, despite the protest that education is a state affair. What does the U.S. Senate have to do with education? But they got around that somehow.
Some of my colleagues remained friendly, but most of them had the normal reaction you’d find in a case like that—they crawled. If they said hello, they looked around to see who was reporting. It was not nice. I was already known as one of the leaders of the Left. I spoke all the time at student meetings—it was not as if they had suddenly discovered a carrier of a disease. But after being fired, there was really no movement of support. Even the AAUP3 didn’t want to handle it. We appealed to them and they turned us down. They said they simply didn’t have the forces. A couple of us from New York made a presentation at the next meeting of the AAUP and tried to get some help from the leadership, but nothing happened. There was no guts.
I didn’t bother trying to find another academic job. The blacklist was just too strong. That would have been absurd. But I had to find something, I was supporting a family at this time, a wife and two and two-thirds children. I was fired in February and my third child was born in May.
I had worked as a stringer at the New York Times after college. At Queens, I had been the adviser to the student newspaper. So journalism was in my background. A neighbor of mine, a decent guy, was vice president for advertising of a small trade publication outfit. He introduced me to the editors of two of the trade journals they published, a roofing magazine and an aluminum window magazine. They let me go out and do articles for them. They were very brave; it sounds cynical when I say this, but at that time they had no notion where this madness would go. I took an assumed name and went around writing articles about successful roofers and window salesmen for about twenty-five dollars apiece. It was a tough way to make a living.
Of course, I got some foul phone calls and dirty mail, and there was a certain amount of coolness from some of the neighbors. But on the other hand, there were some families, Catholic working-class people, firemen, who were very supportive. I remember with eternal gratitude one person who was concerned with only one thing: Oscar lost his job. She was very sweet and kind and gracious, even though you could assume she disagreed with me politically. This was after the Father Coughlin4 days, but the church was still known to be anti-Red. To many of my neighbors, it was a personal issue and simply a matter of we’re friends, its a terrible thing.
The FBI came around to my neighborhood. Years later, when I sent for my FBI and Air Force intelligence dossier, I saw that they had written letters to my former administrators, to chairman of the department and colleagues. They contacted military people, fellow officers in the outfit I was with before I went overseas. I could tell who the letters were from, even though the names are blanked out. Out of all of this tremendous batch of papers, they had only one basis for their investigation: I was a member of a local college teachers union which was thrown out by the AFL. They kept repeating each other, giving as authority a letter from so-and-so in the FBI who used somebody else in the FBI.
I worked as a freelancer for two years. Then an old friend of mine who ran an architectural rendering service asked me if I would be interested in working for American Builder Magazine. Their office was moving from Chicago to New York, and they needed New York bodies. I got the job.
I worked there for two years, almost happily. I became their expert on prefabricated housing. I’d go to the prefab conventions, chat with the people there about the latest, and write a big story. In the spring of ’57, I went to one of the editors to make plans to attend the convention, as usual. He said, “Er, let’s have lunch.” The two editors and I went upstairs to the lunchroom, and one of them said, “I’m sorry, it’s this Queens College stuff. We have to fire you, the publisher says.” That was that. Immediately after lunch, I went to talk to the publisher. He said, “You’re controversial. I have to concern myself with the welfare of all the employees of the magazine.” So I looked at him and said, “Did the FBI come around?” He didn’t deny it. He simply looked down. Because, you know, this was their common practice. A year or two later, he killed the magazine. Not enough profit.
After that, I went and worked on other trade magazines. I had no trouble finding work. Encyclopedias, that sort of thing. In ’63, I met some people who knew the chairman of English at Pratt, a man named Sherwood Weber. I told them that I’d like to go back into teaching. I didn’t know how strong the blacklist was anymore. They mentioned me to Sherwood, and he said, “I know Oscar. Good scholar, honorable man. Let’s try it out.”
I give him credit. It was a courageous thing to do. He had to face the trustees. Then again, he was trying to build up the humanities department, and my Harvard Ph.D. would not do him any harm. I taught one evening class in the fall of ’63, two classes the term after, and then he slipped me into the day session with a full program. I had tenure in two years. According to several people whom Sherwood spoke to, I came to Pratt as a hero. I made sure to tell every class who they were dealing with.
In ’73, some friends of mine in the Queens philosophy department were putting together a religious studies program. I had just finished a book on Buddhism, and they took me on as an adjunct professor. It was strange. Here I was working at Queens and they still hadn’t apologized for firing me.
For years, the teachers from the elementary and high schools who had been fired in the fifties had been receiving pensions. That meant they had been reinstated, fault recognized by the board of education. But the board of higher education, now called board of trustees of CUNY, simply ignored the precedent of the public high schools. I wrote a letter saying, “Get on it, brother. The board of ed has done what’s right. It’s about time the board of higher ed faced the problem.” No answer. I sent a second letter—“Time is getting on and people are beginning to die off.” Nothing. In a third letter, I offered a solution: I would teach for no pay if they agreed to make an adjustment first, and pay us some kind of pension or settlement in reference to the board of education. No answer. Finally, in 1980, about a year later, they passed a resolution of recognition of impropriety and guilt. With the words “We hope money will be found to make a financial settlement.” [Laughs.] I got up at a trustees’ meeting at which this was stated and said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
It took them another two years to arrange a financial settlement. It was forced by a court case. Another teacher and I began to demand reinstatement in the classroom with full back pay whenever they ignored us. Legally it was what we were entitled to. Finally, we reached an agreement. No back pay, no reinstatement in the classroom, but an annuity based on a sum we would have earned within a certain period.
I told the faculty on student scholarships that I would devote the money to paying scholarships. When I went to City College, the class of ’31, there was no tuition. You paid fifty cents for a library card or something, that was the extent of it—in some classes we were even given books. So I figured that is a good way of marking the distinction between the good days of the Depression and the present bad days. So my money goes to pay tuition for promising freshmen and upperclassmen, preferably minorities, and it’s been working well. One Talmudic agreement: I don’t know who the students are and the students don’t know where the money comes from.
While a young professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan, Chandler Davis signed a check that paid for the printing of a pamphlet attacking the House Un-American Activities Committee. From this signature, a chain of events ensued that eventually led Davis to the blacklist and a prison cell.
We went to the University of Michigan in the summer of 1950. My wife enrolled in graduate school, and I was an instructor. I was immediately active in politics. The principal work was organizing speakers to come to campus. There was interest in the civil rights movement; we had action against some of the legal lynchings and frame-up convictions of blacks in the South. And meetings for world peace, the Stockholm Peace Petition,1 and international control of atomic energy.
I remained in the Party longer than many of my friends, until the summer of ’53, not too long before I was subpoenaed. But the Party was less and less important to my political activity, because I was organizing on campus with a group of people most of whom were not in the Party. One of the things we did was turn out an anti-HUAC pamphlet titled Operation Mind. The pamphlet was prepared in January of 1952 and issued in February. We duplicated the thing at Edward Letterprint. I guess they saved the check and took it to the FBI or the Un-American Activities Committee. They must have, because the only thing that the committee appeared to know about the genesis of the pamphlet was that my signature was on the check.
HUAC arrived in the spring of 1952. We assumed there were to be hearings at the University of Michigan, but we hadn’t yet heard of any subpoenas at the university. In the summer of 1952, the State Department said, “It is alleged that both you and your wife are members of the Communist Party.” They came around, knocked on our door, asked us to give them our passports, which we did. I suppose we could have refused.
The passport denial lasted six years, until 1958. It would have lasted longer as far as the Red-hunters were concerned, but Paul Robeson won his case against passport denial. So as soon as Robeson won his case I went right down to the courthouse and applied for my passport, and when I came to the loyalty-oath phrase, I left it blank. And they said, “Oh, you have to fill that in.” I said, “No, I don’t,” and I showed them the story in the morning’s New York Times. They said, “We don’t know anything about that, we’re just following our instructions from Washington.” I said, “Okay, you take this application the way I’ve filled it out and you see what your instructions from Washington are.” Sure enough, I got my passport.
I was subpoenaed by HUAC in the fall of 1953. After some postponements, the hearings were held in May of 1954. The university knew I was going to be subpoenaed, but they didn’t admit it until sometime in 1954. They told me that the committee investigator had come to them with fifteen names and that they, the administration, had talked them down to four,2 not including students. The eventual list ended up with two students who were called. We know now, although they did not tell me at the time, that among the eleven whose names were dropped, some of them were called to testify in executive session. One of those was Lawrence Klein, who later became a well-known economist.3 Some of the others must have been persuaded to be friendly witnesses in secret and I never discovered anything about that.
My decision to use the First Amendment instead of the Fifth was real easy. By the time I made it in the fall of 1953, I had been through a whole bunch of experiences of friends and relatives, including my father.4 My wife and my friends and so forth had discussed all this with me, and we’d looked at all the things you could do in the legal and political context of the time. We hadn’t said, “Gee, if they subpoena any of us tomorrow we’re going to take the First.” But when it happened it was just obvious. The effect of taking the First was that you let yourself in for an uphill fight to make a court test of the legitimacy of the hearings. I had told the university administration I was going to do this.
It’s hard to really put together why this seemed like the thing to do. My wife and I didn’t have a realistic idea of how much of a strain it would be to fight the thing through the courts. One thing we were unrealistic about was how long it might take. One person I talked to had been a First Amendment defendant earlier, Leon Josephson.5 He told me it took him less than a year from getting the first subpoena until exhausting all appeals. For me I got my first subpoena in the fall of ’53 and I exhausted all appeals in the fall of ’59—it took six years.
At the hearing, almost the only thing HUAC brought up was this pamphlet: “Come on now, you can’t fool us. Admit it, you wrote it.” They didn’t seem to know much else about me. That was sort of insulting. I couldn’t imagine with all my political activity that they weren’t aware of me!
I only gave them my name, rank, and serial number. As soon as they began asking did I know so-and-so, was I a member of such-and-such, I just told them I was going to refuse to answer all questions of this sort, and I told them why, which was that I regarded the whole proceeding as illegal. I was then indicted for contempt of Congress.
I was immediately suspended from the university. The executive committee of my department met at once and called unanimously for me to be reinstated without prejudice. The executive committee of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts unanimously made the same recommendation.
But then came the hearings that really counted—the two faculty senate hearings. These committees, although each included at least one liberal, clearly felt mandated to smoke out Reds. Many people who took the position I did before the HUAC nevertheless answered questions before the university on the basis that the university inquisition was somehow different—it was your friends asking. It was different, all right, but I felt that the university, by holding this political inquisition immediately following the congressional hearing, was making itself part of the operation. It’s too bad that some of my colleagues whom I otherwise respected made themselves part of this, but nevertheless they did.
If I were to cooperate with the university committee, then I’d either say yes or no to Party membership. Really, the problem with cooperating with that committee was that there was no way I could tell the truth. If I said yes it would be a lie, and if I said no it would be a lie. If I said yes, then the image that would spring into their mind of what I was and what I was up to would have been false and there would have been no way that I could correct it. And if I said no, the image would also be false, because the image would be of somebody who had seen the error of his ways and was a good anti-Communist liberal the same as everybody was supposed to be, unless they were conservative, of course, which was okay. Neither of those was true.
I was pretty angry that people were saying that I was doing something devious in refusing to answer. The image of me as devious, which of course was regarded as preposterous by my friends, was presumably based on the theory that I was refusing to answer to pretend to be a non-Communist refusing out of principle, whereas I was really a Communist insidiously maintaining my position in the community. I could understand that image, but I couldn’t recognize myself in it! It didn’t have any resemblance to the way I felt about things.
The reason they could have this comic-book image is because of the way Communists in general had been caricatured, and that’s an important ingredient in the thing. The caricature affected every reader of the newspapers, and it affected my liberal colleagues along with everybody else.
This is now June or July of 1954. A second university committee had been set up in advance by agreement between the president and the faculty senate. After the first committee had brought in its reports, I only had a couple of days to look at it before they were scheduling the meetings of the second committee.
The questions the first committee asked were essentially “Are you a nasty Red?” The second committee was again essentially saying, “Well, are you going to exonerate yourself of the charge of being a nasty Red?” The second of those two committees had much shorter hearings—it was really just rubber-stamping what the previous committee had decided.
Before the first of the two committees, they called in my colleagues to try to get the dirt on me without my even knowing that such a session was taking place. In the second one they called me in at the same time as the department executive committee. That consisted of the head of the department, who was a kindly old conservative, and three professors. Two of the three professors said that if they were in my position, they would do just what I was doing. In principle, that ought to have been very embarrassing for the committee, because they were not saying they had discovered that I was a subversive felon, they had said that I was not welcome as a professor because of the stand I was taking toward their committee. So here are these colleagues saying that they would do the same thing. But they refused to allow themselves to be embarrassed.
Right after this I was fired without severance pay. I had savings enough to last for a few months. My wife went to work as an unskilled clerical employee for a few months. I job-hunted like crazy. Quite a lot of places simply weren’t interested, and some places the mathematicians tried to get me in and the administrations turned me down. Many of my friends said it’s because you have the court case hanging over your head. But I made another job hunt in 1961, when the court case was not hanging over my head because I’d served my time, and the same thing happened. I’ve been blacklisted ever since.
We used up our savings, and eventually I got a job. I worked for an ad agency from April 1955 to September 1956. My friend Lloyd Barenblatt, a professor of psychology at Vassar, was subpoenaed a few months later than me and indicted very soon after me. He was a defendant most of the same time I was, but we were in New York at the same time working for ad agencies. A small item about his case happened to be spotted in the New York Times by some higher-up in his agency, and he was fired the same day. The same thing would have happened to me.
Lloyd’s case went through the courts quicker than mine. In 1959 the Supreme Court ruled against him in a five-to-four decision.6 My case was simply denied a hearing by the Supreme Court because it was covered by his case. I then had to serve out my sentence in the contempt case.
I was no longer living in Michigan, and the sentencing judge refused to allow me to go into custody in New England—he did that because he knew it would be inconvenient for me. I had to fly out to Michigan, was taken into custody in Grand Rapids, transported in handcuffs to Milan Correctional Institution in Michigan. Then I was transferred from Milan to Danbury. That took a month, because one is transferred under armed guard with other convicts by special Greyhound buses that are made over with wire mesh. So I had a week in Milan and then the bus took us down to Terre Haute Reformatory, then another bus took us to Chillicothe Reformatory, then another bus took us to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, and so forth, on to Danbury.
There, Barenblatt was one of my fellow prisoners, and another guy, a personal friend, with a court case just like mine, was also there. And there were several conscientious objectors. There was another guy who was really a political prisoner, Alfred Slack. He was sentenced for passing military information to the Russians, but it was really a political case, because this was at a time when the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States.7 The guy was a saint, a wonderful human being. He had been helpful to everybody. He was appreciated for all the correct reasons. All the time he was in the penitentiary, he got no time off for good behavior. There’s something ironic about that.
I always told the other prisoners what I was in for, and I got a few amusing responses, like “Tell Khrushchev to parachute us some machine guns, we’re with him.” Which of course was a joke and was known to be a joke. Then I got a different kind of joking response from a con man—he was in for running an abortion mill. He was a friend of mine, and at one point some months after I had told him what I was in for, he casually said to me, “Six months of this for a principle?” But, of course, there again there’s something ironic about that too, because although he was simply a professional criminal, the crime that he was in for was a moral crime. He was insistent on the fact that his outfit did good abortions, he was performing a public service.
I got out in the spring of 1960, and at this point I was a hero in many people’s eyes. But that didn’t help me with employers. In the fall of 1961, I began job-hunting again. I tried dozens of places and was turned down at all of them. But there were several, including Western Reserve University, University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Colorado, where the mathematicians really were trying to get me a job. Probably, no matter how long I encouraged them to stick to it, they would have failed. When I got the job offer from the University of Toronto, I just told them, “I give up, I’m accepting this job. Don’t bother continuing to fight.” And they were relieved.
Robert Colodny fought in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion from 1937 to 1938, and was badly wounded. After serving with distinction in World War Two, he became the vice chairman of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee in San Francisco. It was then that he began his academic career as a historian.
In 1950, the University of California suddenly sprang the demand for a loyalty oath. The fight against it involved people quite apart from the Left, people who were ultraconservative, as this went against the constitution of the university. A majority of the faculty simply refused to sign it. The Korean War began that summer, and that’s what broke the thing open. All the foreigners on the faculty, who included some of the eminent people, had to sign or be deported.
A dozen of us who were Ph.D. candidates in the history department, and hence teaching assistants and graduate assistants, got together and agreed that either all would sign it or none would sign it. We agreed none would sign it.
The university set up a kind of hearing board. And you could come before the board and give your reasons for not signing. They simply didn’t renew my contract, which is tantamount to firing. I was blacklisted for six years within the university system. You see, the office of teacher placement at the University of California sends out all of the credentials of its graduates. In my case, this included the raw data from the files of the FBI. Every time I applied for a job somewhere, that garbage went with it.
I finally found out about it when a dean at one of the colleges in California was so enraged by this that he phoned me and told me about it. They stopped doing that when it was brought to the attention of the high officials.
I finally got a job in ’56 at San Francisco State College. Soon after, the FBI visited the president of the college and told him what a terrible person he had on the faculty. Secretly, I received word that my contract would not be renewed. So when I got an offer from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, I went there.
Kansas, in fact, was one of the most liberal schools I was ever at—as long as you didn’t get divorced, seduce freshmen girls, or get drunk on Sunday. But in terms of what liberals usually think of as liberal, in terms of freedom of ideas, of speech, and opinion, they were way ahead of Princeton, Columbia, Yale, and Harvard. That job lasted for two years, then Pittsburgh came looking for me.
Things in Pittsburgh went along fine—until 1961, then it all came pouring out. What seems to have been the trigger was when I—along with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and others like that—signed an ad for “Fair Play for Cuba” that ran in the New York Times. The FBI started tracking down everybody on that list. This led them to Pittsburgh.
They got one of their patsies in the press to interview me. I gave a fairly accurate biographical account in defense of this and that. The article appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Press, with sidebars detailing everything I had done, well-known Communist front, and what-have-you.
Meanwhile, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, under Eastland, had convinced itself that Spanish Republican exiles were primarily responsible for the rise of Castro. So one thing led to another and I found myself subpoenaed.
The Senate asked me why I had applied for a fellowship that had been advertised in Science and Society.1 Apparently they had an informer in there, too. Science and Society had a social history fund and they were offering small grants. I had applied for one of them.
I told them what I had proposed to invstigate, which was the disjunction between Marxian ontology and Marxian epistemology, but neither Senator Eastland nor the stenotypist could understand what the hell I was talking about. So I said, “Give me a pad, Senator, and I’ll write this down with definitions.” And the committee sat there while I explained what epistemology was, what ontology was, and why there should be a neat fit in a monistic theory. They took all this down, then they got tired of talking to me. [Laughs.]
When this newspaper article was published, the university was compelled by state law to certify that I was not subversive within the framework of the constitution of Pennsylvania. So they hired one of the most eminent law firms in the city to act as a gatherer of information. One hundred thousand dollars later they had compiled about twenty volumes of testimony from all over the world, including a great deal of testimony from police informers. They tracked me all over the globe, always coming back to Spain and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Some things I was accused of I would have been very glad to have done. For instance, one informer said that Robert Colodny was the commander of the Chicago post of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I’d have been very honored to have been, but simply wasn’t. So then I knew that the son of a bitch was a paid liar who would say anything he was told to.
The university hearings went on for days. They put me under oath, and the lawyer for the big legal corporation that was supposed to be gathering evidence and neutral turned himself into a prosecuting attorney. He used all the tricks of a criminal trial to try to trip me up. He tried to demonstrate that I held an unbroken sympathy for Communist causes, for the Soviet Union, and for revolutionary movements.
The FBI actually tried to subpoena the notebooks of my students, and the students wouldn’t give them. Furthermore, the FBI forged letters from my students directly to the board of regents. There was even correspondence about it between the FBI in Pittsburgh and J. Edgar, who gave them permission to go ahead.
I found out about that almost purely by accident. I got the files after Congress demanded that they be made available to the victims of the COINTEL program.2 They drove up to my little house one day in a big government Cadillac and presented me with this stuff from the Department of Justice.
The whole case went on uninterruptedly for about six months. The Senate came first, then HUAC. The HUAC and university hearings overlapped. I would fly to Washington and back. I never missed a class during the whole damned business.
The Senate was interested in more geopolitical stuff, but HUAC wanted to know everybody I knew that they had the name of: “Did you know so-and-so as a member of the Communist conspiracy?” Including the chief Episcopal bishop of California, Bishop Oxnam [laughs], because he was a cosponsor of the San Francisco chapter of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. So they asked me if I knew him as a member of the Communist conspiracy, and my answer was “No sir, I knew him as a toiler in the vineyard of the Lord.” Then they dropped that kind of questioning.
Eventually the chancellor of the university issued a report clearing me of all charges, which was submitted to the governor, and that was the end of the Colodny case. But the support was quite unusual for a city like this, in that the famous labor priest Charles Owen Rice, who had done in quite a number of radicals in the unions, came to my defense. Ninety-eight percent of my colleagues were in my favor, not only at the University of Pittsburgh but all the universities around this part of the country. Later on, the industrial financial elite, who had great hopes of a renaissance at the University of Pittsburgh, came to my defense too. I think because they were able to find out through their connections in the intelligence community that a lot of the charges against me were unfounded. And they were able to find concrete evidence of what would be called “considerable service to the state,” particularly during World War Two. I think they didn’t want to see the university name blackened and didn’t believe that I was such a dangerous type after all. They simply told the tinhorn politicians and the yellow press to lay off, and they laid off. So that is probably why the case ended in that peculiar acquittal of all charges.
After that incident, nothing else ever came up, because I was a full professor. Nobody was willing to take on professors anymore, because the inquisitors lost. They gave the game up, and that was the end of it.
In March 1953, Smith was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to testify about his student membership in the Young Communist League some fifteen years previously. There, to his regret, he named names. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
I started at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, in the fall of 1935. Even at that time, Reed had a reputation for being radical and bohemian. I began to have my eyes opened politically. I joined the American Student Union, a coalition of socialist organized groups, and discovered that the leadership of the ASU was held by a small unit of the Young Communists League. Since they were the decision-makers, I joined that group. It didn’t involve making the kind of life commitment that Party membership would have required, but you did have to stick your neck out a bit. One’s membership was supposedly secret.
When I transferred to Stanford, I rejoined the American Student Union there, but I did not establish any footing in the Young Communists group. I was getting nervous about it. The Hitler-Stalin pact was absolutely decisive to me. I decided at that point I was just not going to have any more truck with Stalinism. Then the war began, and I got drafted. The Soviet Union was our ally, and Uncle Joe was portrayed as a benign figure. The conflicts aroused by his deal with Hitler were in abeyance, and so I viewed the Soviet Union with rosier overtones.
I had completed two and a half years of graduate work before I got drafted. After the war, I went back to Harvard and got my Ph.D. I was invited to stay on as an assistant professor there, which I did. I was not heavily politically active, but I received a good deal of solicitation in the mail to sign this or that. I signed some of it, but my participation in radical politics was minimal.
I went from Harvard to being chair of the psychology department at Vassar College. After a couple years there, I moved into New York to work for the Social Science Research Council, a private organization dependent on foundation resources that supported graduate training in the social sciences and encouraged research.
I was still at the SSRC when I was subpoenaed on March 2, 1953. I was called up to appear before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The terror was in my heart. At Vassar, I had encountered a right-wing mimeographed publication that published an article on so-called Red-ucators in women’s colleges. I was listed in it. The Senate Internal Security Committee focused on the same items listed in “Red-ucators,” so they’d obviously read it.1
Since I was at the Social Science Research Council, which had good foundation connections, the director suggested I talk with one of these really high-class foundation lawyers in New York and get advice as to how I should handle myself before the committee. I thought a good deal about it and decided that I did not want to be a hero. On the other hand, I did not want to be a fink. And you know, I had family, I was not really ready to make an heroic stand. But I thought that I could do a decent thing by trying to stand on principle but being ready to name only the names of the open Party members who had recruited us and forget about anybody else who was involved. I was in a good position, because we had no formal relationships with faculty. Although I knew informally of some faculty members presumably being Party members, we had no official dealings with them. So that memory was not at all at risk.
I was encouraged by the lawyer. He said, “That’s a good strategy. If you have to give names, give the known names, and let your memory stop at that point.”
I remember coming into the hearing and being interrogated by the chief counsel, a Mr. Morris, with Senator Jenner,2 the chair of the committee, in the background. There were a couple of senators in the hearing room and stenographers. I tried to be self-respecting and explained my scruples about naming names. They said, “That’s too bad, but we need those names. If people are no longer involved, that will enable us to establish that fact.”
Having tried to maintain my honorable position, I was led into naming one or two additional names of people I had no intention of naming. One of them was the woman I had been married to, but I knew that she was no longer involved with the Party.
I was not able to maintain the posture that I had originally intended. I went away feeling absolutely sick. I remember going up to my room in the old Willard Hotel and retching, as though I was the lowest form of life. It was a miserable feeling.
I felt so badly about having named names that I shoved it out of my memory. Many years later, a progressive psychological organization that I belonged to, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, was planning a fiftieth anniversary of its founding. They asked if I would be willing to comment about McCarthyism. I said, “Yes, yes, I would. I had experience with it.” In order to do that, I requested documentation under the Freedom of Information Act. When I got the stuff, I realized that I had repressed the fact that I gave names I never intended to give. I received these transcripts and I couldn’t look at them. When I finally mustered up the courage, I saw why I didn’t want to: I saw the very unheroic role that I played.
When I spoke at the anniversary meeting of the psychological group, a lot of people came up to me and said, “Thank you for saying what you did.” It was like a public confession, and people seemed to need to hear it. One of the people who had been fired in New York City, Bernard Riess,3 came up to me and seemed to be very grateful that I had made a clean breast of the whole experience. Others said, “A lot of us had that same experience and have been hesitant to talk about it. The only ones you hear about are the people who were heroic, went to jail or lost their jobs. But a lot of other people tried to compromise and were hurt. They’ve just laid low because they felt so badly.”
While I think the committee had the overt and partly legitimate case of trying to smoke out former Stalinists in the universities, I’m sure they were trying to introduce a chill factor. They wanted to make people on the Left lie low and give freer reign to the expression of right-wing ideas. People become more hesitant to speak out. The professoriate is more individualistic and less coerceable than other professions, so the long-term effects in academia were probably less than on the entertainment industry or the government. But I believe it had to have affected the way people taught, the types of subjects they taught. People tend to pull in their horns in that way.
My appearance before the Jenner Committee was in executive session. It was not in any way publicized at the time. My colleagues, acquaintances, the people I named, didn’t know about it. Had I been heroic, it would’ve probably come out. But I was unheroic, so it didn’t.
Labor Schools
A large man, plain-spoken and humorous. “I joined the Party about 1930, I was sixteen or seventeen. My mother was a Party member too. She was originally a milliner, one of the six women who established the Millinery Workers Union in 1913. She was passionately on the side of working people.” We meet in a well-kept Edwardian below the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
The California Labor School was started in 1942. It was founded as the Tom Mooney1 Labor School, and its first president and vice president were the sister and brother of Tom Mooney. We found the name an obstacle to recruiting and broadening the school. I think they both resigned. We were determined to, quote, not live necessarily in the past. But other than that, we didn’t get away from what they represented. We kept the name of the library as the Tom Mooney Library.
I had been the educational director of the National Maritime Union, where I set up classes in the national headquarters in New York—classes on the history of the labor movement, public speaking, labor journalism (a lot of guys that went to sea wanted to write), Robert’s Rules of Order, the history of American politics, political economy, pretty orthodox stuff. We didn’t teach them how to tie knots—although it would’ve been a good idea. [Laughs.] If we’d been less doctrinaire, we could’ve used the skills of the old sailors, but we pulled in a lot of the young guys. I also invented a program called Books at Sea. We put chests of books on every ship—titles identified with the labor movement and the Left—and got rid of the crap that the missions and the well-intentioned do-gooders put aboard. We just threw them away. Those sea chests went on every ship in the Atlantic and the Gulf.
I had just landed in San Francisco, off the ship the President Coolidge, where we had collected a lot of money for the idea of the school. The idea didn’t originate on the Coolidge. We just were asked to help, and we made such a big contribution—we had eight hundred crew members—mostly through the fact that I was aboard the ship. People felt there was a need to facilitate the integration of new workers, who because of the war were coming into the Bay Area by the thousands. Most of the workers were from the Southwest or the Deep South. On this side of the bay the black community had about four thousand people, and suddenly it went up to as high as eighty or ninety thousand. The East Bay always had a larger black community, and that doubled and tripled. Unions which had a hundred members like Shipyard Joiners and the Boilermakers suddenly expanded to ten, fifteen, twenty thousand members. There was a tremendous blossoming of the unions.
The idea of the school was a general, popular one. The people that, in the main, organized and put it together were the Communist Party and other sections of the community close to the Left, most notably a guy named Frank Carlson, who was really the first director. When I came off the ship I was asked to take it on, which I did.
Most of the time my salary was thirty-five dollars a week. We had a big staff and more students than any other labor school in the country, mostly because we had a trade union base. The Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago, the Jefferson School in New York, the Tom Paine School in Philadelphia, and some others, these were really schools of academics and intellectuals, some working trade unionists. In San Francisco every single union with few exceptions officially supported the school and gave it money. It was true in the East Bay and it was true in Santa Clara and Contra Costa too. Five college presidents—Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, a couple of others—were advisers to the school. As a matter of fact, the associate director of the school was a guy named Holland Roberts, who’d been a professor of education at Stanford and resigned to come on as my associate—which was a little peculiar inasmuch as I’d only gone to the eighth grade. We also got foundation grants. When Sinatra made that film The House I Live In,”2 we were given seven thousand dollars from the proceeds. After World War Two we were accredited under the GI Bill of Rights.
Before the Red-baiting started in ’47, we had the support of all the local papers, the News, the Call-Bulletin, the Chronicle, the Examiner . . . oh, the Examiner? Never the Examiner!3 But all the others. They wrote long articles about the school, its programs, and about me. The mayor even put me on the Council of Civic Unity during the war years. I got a lot of support from business. Crocker Bank gave us five hundred dollars a month. Bank of America and Shell also gave us money; they were all over the concept of unity to win the war.
One woman, whose father was one of the Big Five4 in Hawaii, gave a lot of money. She and her uncle owned most of the real estate in the city. Louise Bransten, whose family were Rosenberg Rice and Dried Fruit—they sold their business to Consolidated Groceries for twenty million dollars— she not only gave me interest but she gave part of her capital for the school. Dan Kochler—head of Levi Strauss—was a heavy supporter. At the same time he was fighting a dollar minimum wage for operators up in Sacramento. I remember saying, “You’re worth millions of bucks. How the fuck can you oppose somebody getting a dollar an hour?” He’s say, “Dave, it’d drive us out of California if we have to pay that.”
A woman named Durham, whose family established Goodyear Rubber, gave me a lot of money. One day, she told me she had a small account in Ohio that had been irritating her, so she’d like to give it to me! [Laughs.] So I had this funny relationship with a lot of people who were very generous to me and to the school.
Then the baiting began. I was called up in front of the Tenney Committee5 as director of the labor school. They accused the school of being Communist, of putting out a “pro-Soviet line,” whatever that was. To some extent they were not inaccurate about the fact there were Communists in the leadership, including myself. But by that time, the school had many other influences. Stan Isaacs, who was big in the labor movement, was president of the board. Another guy from the railway unions was a major factor in the school. The school was a genuine coalition. What we were teaching, what we were doing, included Communists. We wouldn’t have taught an anti-Soviet policy, but we wouldn’t have been antiunion either.
Our class in comparative philosophy was taught by an Episcopalian bishop, Parsons, who was a leader in the civil liberties movement. We had a tremendous art department, which was taught by a great variety of famous artists, a bigger art school than the San Francisco Art Institute. Then we had huge classes in psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis; those were unbelievably popular. So we had a big debate going on about the question of Freud and Marx and Adler and Jung. Our teachers were drawn from a variety of specialities in that field, and they were the biggest classes in the school. Now it’s true that our classes in labor and philosophy per se hedged closely to a Marxist position, but there was a lot more going on at the school.
When Tenney asked me if I was a Communist, I didn’t refuse to answer. I said, “I want you to redefine what you mean.” We wrangled about it, and I told him he was full of shit. They threw me out. Same thing happened in the federal committee.6 I brought a lawyer, they threw the lawyer out, so I got another one. They eventually threw four lawyers out. One time, I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that question. Mostly because I got to take a piss.” So the chairman said, “Marshal Fink”—they had a marshal named Fink—“Marshal Fink, escort him to the John.” It was hilarious. My intention was to fuck it up. But it was an absurd hearing anyway. How could you identify the origins of what we were teaching? There were some Communists among the teachers, but we had such a broad curriculum they were actually a minority. I was functioning in a labor movement which by and large did not have a Left ideology, except the longshoremen and a few other unions. I understood that you couldn’t have a school leadership that ignored those realities.
The school lasted until ’54. I left in ’49.7 First of all, I got tired of raising money. I wasn’t teaching, which I liked to do. And then I started to disagree with the Party, who were putting a lot of pressure on me to drop classes in psychology. And I started to disagree with them—not too openly—on the issue of the amount of emphasis put on language in relation to the black issue. Not that it wasn’t important, but not as important as some. Even if you used the word “black” in studies—we had one case where a guy was teaching the history of primitive economics and he used the word “black,” indicating negative. He was attacked savagely for perpetuating “black” as a negative. So I started to disagree with them on some of this. There was a series of black films put out by Hollywood which the Party negatively characterized as just a more profound form of white chauvinism, and I didn’t agree with that either. By that time I had become very good and warm friends with Paul Robeson, who had some influence out here in this discussion.
The school grew enormously. At one point we had one hundred and sixteen teachers between here and Oakland and Los Angeles, plus extension classes. I was raising close to a quarter of a million dollars a year. The school staggered on for five more years without me, and became more driven in part because of the attacks. It was forced into isolation, it became more and more a Party school, which I was fighting and was opposed to.
I stayed in the Party until about ’56. I would’ve gotten out earlier except McCarthyism came along. I felt, “Fuck it, this is not the time to leave. It would be tantamount to running away.” So I stayed and took on the fight on labor defense and the Smith Act fight and the McCarran Act fight, deportations and all that shit. But my heart was not in the Highlands. When the Khrushchev report came out, I left the Party, which is now thirty-three years ago, I guess.
Dave Jenkins died on June 18, 1993, at the age of seventy-nine.
An independent and prolific Marxist historian, Aptheker was a defense witness for many of the Communist Party leaders prosecuted under the Smith Act. He was also a prominent figure in the Jefferson School.
I began teaching American history around 1936. I was a teacher at the Workers School before I was in the Party. Then the Workers School became the School for Democracy and I taught there. Then the Jefferson School was created during the war, ’43 or ’44, by which time I was in the Army. When I came home from overseas, I became associated with that.
The Left at that time was very strong. First, in terms of the New Deal in the thirties and the tremendous growth of the labor movement, which was a fundamental source of support, especially in California. And with the struggle against fascism, the whole Spanish War business—several of our teachers were Spanish vets—the school attracted thousands. Whenever I came to the California Labor School, it was always jammed. I spoke once or twice at their annual dinner, that kind of thing. It was part of the euphoria with the defeat of fascism and the Wallace movement, in which the Left was very strong.
The Jefferson School had its own building on Sixth Avenue at about 15th or 16th Street. There were several people who were very influential in it. One was Alexander Trachtenberg, who was the owner of International Publishers and whose history went way back into prerevolutionary Russia.1 He had a Ph.D. from Yale, and was associated with the old Rand School. Trachtenberg was important in the creation and sustaining of the Jefferson School. Howard Selsam, who had been a professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College and had been summarily fired in the thirties in a witch hunt, was a leader in the school and taught there.2 And an African-American chap, Doxey Wilkerson, who had been a professor at Howard, quite distinguished in social sciences, especially education, and had published important studies for the federal government. Doxey was also one of the leading figures at the Jefferson School. And I was. I taught classes there in what we called Negro history and American history from then on until the persecution by the government in the McCarthy period.
The school was open to everybody and it was attended by everybody. By about 1946, we had thousands of students and we had to put in another elevator, it was a seven- or nine-story building. We had a very large bookstore on the ground floor, which was very busy. We had a considerable faculty, including Dashiell Hammett,3 who taught short-story writing and detective writing; Sidney Finkelstein, one of the few geniuses I’ve known in my life, who taught art and music. W.E.B. Du Bois taught a course on Africa for a while. Very distinguished people not only taught but visited. Alice Childress, the well-known black author, was a student there. All sorts of people were students. Mostly young, men and women, black and white. Lorraine Hansberry was one of my students,4 for instance, and her gorgeous friend Yvonne Gregory, who was a poet and couldn’t take Jim Crow anymore and left for France and married there. They were two such beautiful women that when they entered the room, everything stopped and people looked at them, fresh and gorgeous, full of life. And then Susan Brown-miller, who later wrote some best-seller,5 she mentions that she studied with me—in fact, she boasts about it.
It was a very busy place. Most of the classes were in the evening. We had thousands of students, and everyone paid tuition. Faculty wasn’t paid, except in special cases where someone needed ten dollars or something to get food. Sidney Finkelstein, for instance, had been fired from various jobs and finally he was employed by the Post Office as some sort of clerk. He tried to organize a union and was fired. He had very great difficulty getting jobs. He published numerous books, of course, but the royalties were very slim. I was one of the people that insisted that Sidney be paid five or ten dollars when he lectured.
All kinds of classes were taught: languages, writing, music, dance, history, economics, sociology, political science, labor organizing, philosophy, and dialectical materialism. There were straight courses in philosophy in which Marxism, of course, was one of the subjects studied. It was simply a left-leaning university, that’s the way I would describe it. What students could find at the Jefferson School that they couldn’t find at CCNY was reality. For instance, I was perhaps the first outside of black universities to teach anything remotely resembling the truth about American history, and particularly African-American history.
There are any number of professors now who took my courses in history, and some are quite distinguished. Most of them will acknowledge this. I inspired studies of the Negro in agriculture, the Negro in the trade union movement, the Negro opposition to imperialism, and so on. I couldn’t get a job in a university, but I have been the adviser of many dissertations. My book American Negro Slave Revolts, published by Columbia in a moment of madness in 1943, was the first significant attack upon the racist nonsense on docility and passivity and so on. It’s now a classic. It had to fight its way through the incredible racism of the history profession and anti-Semitism, but it’s made its way. You have to read Aptheker now.
I lectured quite often at all the other schools, the Sam Adams School, the Abraham Lincoln School—William L. Patterson6 for a while was director of that school—and then the labor school in San Francisco. There was also something in L.A., and I lectured there. There was no formal organizational connection between the labor schools. They were all Left schools and sympathetic to the Party, though they weren’t Party schools. The Party had its own schools, which were held at specific instances and were directed by and had comrades who were students. They trained cadre and let them know something of the history of the Party and what the program was.
The school was closed in the McCarthy period, probably around ’55. We fought to keep it going, but we couldn’t. It was on the Attorney General’s list, there were hearings before various boards, and there was also physical violence. The windows of the bookstore were repeatedly broken, the students were attacked, epithets and so on. We finally had to brick the bookstore windows, and you then had to enter the bookstore through the entrance to the building, which of course was impossible in terms of sales. I later learned that some of the terrorism came from students at the Xavier School, a nearby Catholic school. It was an organized campaign. One of the students who finally came to his senses told me about it. This violence would not have closed the school—the government persecution and the legal fees and the whole goddamn business did.
The government charged that the school was a subversive institution. It had to register under the McCarran Act, which of course the school refused to do, so there were hearings.7 I didn’t participate in those hearings, I was so busy doing other things. The government declared the school illegal, subversive, and seditious. Above all what they wanted was the names of students and the names of contributors—because we had annual dinners—and of course we wouldn’t give them names.
My publishers were attacked. Columbia took my book, American Negro Slave Revolts, off its list in ’47, although it was in its third printing. I finally persuaded International Publishers to buy it, and they brought it out in ’51 and sold many copies.
When the school had to close, it simply was closed—and then people demanded a school. By that I mean, they stopped me on the street and said, “Why don’t you start a school?” Well, I spoke to Sidney about it, I spoke to Victor Perlo, a very distinguished economist, and we started a school. I rented rooms on Broadway near what was Klein’s department store. We began to get dozens of students, pretty soon hundreds of students. We rented more rooms and there we were. That lasted several years.
The collapse of the labor schools is simply one example of what was lost. Over the course of years, tens of thousands of Americans wanted the schools and paid to go to them. There were pressures against them, psychological and otherwise, but they went.
Public Schools
Short and grandmotherly, forthright. We meet in Berkeley, at her son’s home; there are children everywhere. In 1947, back in New York City, she ran as a Progressive for president of her local PTA.
My children went to a public school in Queens. It was Sunnyside—a section of Queens that had been developed by Henry Wright. He’d built these small attached houses in an attempt to do an ideal community. Mrs. Roosevelt was interested in it. They attracted a rather interesting group of people—artists, writers, a lot of progressive people. We all knew each other and it was very pleasant. But outside of Sunnyside Gardens, it was a whole other story—that was where the conflict began. There was a good deal of anti-Semitism. My nephew went to junior high; he was older, and he was chased home by kids. The kids had their lunch money taken from them. It was a combination of a rather tough neighborhood and the protected enclave where we lived.
I was on the PTA board. Because I have literary interests, another woman and I ran the PTA newspaper. And I must say it was pretty good. But looking back at it, we did a number of rather foolish things. We’d invited outside speakers at PTA meetings who were political, and that riled up a lot of people, and I can see why—it was ridiculous, but at the time we were caught up in that kind of thing. Anyway, there was a big struggle over who was going to run for presidency of the PTA. There was somebody who was much more radical than I was and then there was a very reactionary candidate. I was supposed to be the unity candidate of the whole thing. I didn’t want to do it. I had three small children, and it’s a lot of work. But I thought, if it’s going to mean peace in the neighborhood, I would do it.
The politics of this thing is just ridiculous. A group that considered themselves Trotskyites, I believe, decided that I was representing the Stalinist Communists. And so they decided to run another candidate, with the result that we had a microcosm of the Cold War. It really was. Nearby, there was also a very strong Catholic church, whose priest was really very conservative and very scared about anything progressive. He denounced me from the pulpit of the Catholic church during a Sunday sermon, and all the children went home from Sunday school with fliers telling their parents to go vote. The children went to parochial schools, but they were told to vote in the public school election, because I was the devil incarnate.
Some neighborhood woman that I had been quite friendly with—our kids played together—said to my oldest son, “You know, your mother’s a Red. She should be put up against a wall and shot.” A little kid who was eight years old! And David came home crying. Looking at it now, after forty years or so, I think, “My God! How ridiculous this whole thing was.” But it was very real. I got threatening phone calls; the bushes were pulled up on our front lawn. Finally, the board of the PTA decided that we should have the Honest Ballot Association monitor this election because these people whose children were not even in the public schools were going to come and vote. And they did. They came out in masses. It even got into the New York Times.
With the Honest Ballot Association, you had to prove your child was in the public school. So we had this awful election and I won overwhelmingly. When they inducted me as president of this PTA, the superintendent of the district said, “I don’t know why Ruth would want this job!” And I was standing there thinking, “I don’t know why I want it!”
Aside from that, that spring I had bought myself a nice red coat and I wore a black dress and my red coat, and some of the people in the audience cackled, “Oh, now she’s showing her true colors!” I must say I can laugh at it now, but it was a madness that went on, that stirred people up against one another: Jews against Catholics. It was a small thing, but it was an indication of what had happened with the Cold War, with this Red specter—that somebody like me could be a danger to a community.
Well, my husband was so upset, he couldn’t stand it. He had envisioned our having a nice, peaceful life, and so he decided—I was very much opposed to it—that we should move to the suburbs. Well, I stayed there about a year and a half as PTA president, and then I left.
After we moved to Westchester in 1949, I said to Sam, “I’m not going to get into the PTA. I’m just going to tend my garden and take care of my children and do my writing and forget all this nonsense.” Unfortunately, what happened was, again, we had a very bad school system and a very poor PTA. Someone came to me with some other women and said, “Look, we’ve just got to do something about getting rid of a member of the board of education.” So I got involved again. And the FBI started following me around.
They had been turned on to me through the activities in the Sunnyside PTA. We later learned that a woman on the board of the Westchester PTA was reporting to the FBI, and she had us all tagged as Reds!
We were all so careful and so suspicious of one another. I remember these women that I was working with going out to lunch together one day, and we finally broke through when one of the women said, “Well, who didn’t give to support the Loyalists in Spain?” And that loosened things up a bit. So we were able to talk, but basically we didn’t talk.
There was a presidential election, Truman against Dewey; Henry Wallace was running on the Progressive ticket. And we’d been talking in the house, the kids always listened. We didn’t know whether we were going to vote for Truman or Wallace. By this time the atmosphere of fear was so great, the kids knew enough to shut up—except for the youngest, who was not inhibited the way the older two were. And when the kids across the street, who were strong Republicans, said, “Who are you going to vote for?”—you know how kids talk—he said, “Wallace!” Our middle daughter almost killed him! She said, “Lenny, shut up!” Came back and told us, “That kid is nuts.”
You didn’t say these things. You didn’t tell anybody you were going to vote for Wallace. And of course all these women that I knew so well at that time, we didn’t discuss the election at all. It was as if there were no election going on.
The FBI were following me around. Later I sent for my file. I figured I had to have a file, and I did. They call you a “subject”—subject’s car was parked outside a house where there was presumably a meeting going on. Subject’s license plate was noted at this home. Subject was seen going into New York on the train. In fact, the day I went into New York on the train, why they followed me I don’t know—it was my birthday and I was going to have lunch with somebody. But going to New York is a subversive act, if you live in the suburbs, right?
One thing was that they were aware of what I had written. I had a story published in the California Quarterly, and in Partisan Review, and in some women’s magazine which obviously is not Left. But the FBI knew every story I had published. And they said that the California Quarterly was obviously a Left magazine. I guess it was a little bit.
They visited all my neighbors, and I found that out because next door to us there was a family of refugees from Germany. They were German Jews who had escaped from Hitler. The FBI asked them if I had meetings in my house or if they saw strange cars coming out. She said, “Look, this is a community-minded woman. She collects for the Community Chest.” Then they said, “Please don’t tell her that we were here.” She said she saw them go across the street to good neighbors of ours, whose children played with our children, all up and down and around. Nobody told me except this woman; she would have no truck with it. She invited Sam and me over there and said, “I’m telling you because this was the way it started in Germany.”
A gentle woman. In 1946, Eisenberg was attacked by the California State Committee on Un-American Activities as a “skilled propagandist for Communist totalitarianism.” She was called before state committees three times (once for writing a letter of support for a friend’s husband) before being blacklisted in 1954. She never again taught in public schools.
I was the child of immigrant parents who treasured public education. They had none in old Russia, from which they came. I tried so hard in school. My mother couldn’t read or write, and here I was getting A’s on every paper I ever wrote. The family always said, “This one has got to go to college and become a teacher.” And this one did.
In 1936, I got assigned as substitute teacher to Canoga Park High School. It was run by an arch-Republican reactionary. I had always been extremely active in demonstrations, especially during the Depression. So was everyone else I knew: my husband, my family, my friends. We were trying to bring about some sort of relief—employment, welfare, or just support to the thousands of people out of work.
At the time, the Los Angeles school system was treating their substitute teachers very badly. They were paying us extremely low wages, significantly less than the permanent teachers got for the same work. So a number of us from Canoga Park got together and formed the Probationary and Substitute Teachers Organization. We went to Sacramento and got a law passed regulating the L.A. board’s practices. Shortly afterwards I was made a probationary teacher, the first step in becoming tenured.
Jack Tenney1 was running for state senator, and one day, he made a campaign stop in Canoga Park. The people that initiated the political meeting were diehard Republicans. They called Roosevelt a Communist. To them, he was the worst kind of President that you could have. At the school, we were supporting Roosevelt in every way in his war effort. We had paper drives and bond drives, and were so successful that Bob Hope came out to praise us at an assembly. The people in town hated the liberal trends at the school. Mr. Robinson, the editor of the Canoga Park Herald, the local paper, and one family in particular, the Nofzigers, supported the Jack Tenney campaign. They said to him, “You have got to get into that nest of Communists up at the high school. They are endangering our country, poisoning the minds of our youth. We want them out! Especially that Jew,” meaning me.
Adding fuel to the fire, Lyn Nofziger2 was in my journalism class. He was in his mid-senior term when he came to me and asked if he could write a gossip column. I didn’t like the idea, and the student staff voted one hundred percent not to permit it. Lyn went home very sullen. For the rest of the semester, he did not write anything. I gave him a courtesy B, because he had fulfilled his assignments up until midterm, and I suspected there was home influence working at this.
On the last day of school, I was getting ready for summer vacation, sorting my papers and getting rid of junk. School had been dismissed at noon, and so the place was empty. I remember that I had my door propped open because it was such a hot day. Then I heard a click, click, click of heels in the empty hallway. It stopped at my door. A voice said, “Are you Mrs. Eisenberg?” I said, “Yes, come in.”
“I don’t want to come in. I’m Lyn’s mother. I have his report card in my hand. How dare you give my son a B? That’s a disgrace in my family. You dirty Jew, I’ll get even with you!”
Jean Wilkinson, the teacher in the room next door, heard this. So did the janitor. I was so shocked, I just sat there in utter disbelief.
In October of 1946, I received a summons to appear before the Jack Tenney California Un-American Activities Committee. I believe Mrs. Nofziger used her personal influence with Jack Tenney to get me summoned.
I had been advised by the teachers’ union3 lawyer not to answer any questions beyond giving my name—if I answered one, I would have to answer all—and that’s what I tried to do. They asked about my work as a representative of my teachers’ union at the labor school in Los Angeles, the People’s Educational Center. Apparently, it was organized by Communists. I didn’t know they were Communists. I only volunteered to be a delegate because I was interested in adult education. In the end, I only attended two sessions at the center because my workload at school was so heavy. Then they asked about meetings I had attended. I had once gone to hear Paul Robeson sing. All the people there must have been Communists, because he was one. Of course, they asked me if I was a member of the Party. They always asked you that. I refused to answer.
The Nofzigers and Mr. Robinson of the Canoga Park Herald testified against me. One of them, I don’t remember which, told the committee, “Mrs. Eisenberg had copies of the Wall Street Journal in her room!” [Laughs.] And Lyn Nofziger’s sister Rosemary manufactured an item to suit them: “She had People’s World tacked on the door! She had the Daily World in her room.” Absolutely ludicrous! It would have been bona fide journalistic instruction to show it as a contemporary newspaper, but I found that it had no place in a high school instructional room. I put up the best—the Christian Science Monitor, and yes, the Wall Street Journal, because I was teaching journalism. [Laughs.]
They went after my methods of teaching. According to the committee, some of the editorials that I approved in the school paper were “Communistic,” because they advocated that we should participate in the United Nations and that we should teach young people to practice their inherited rights at school. They said, “You are accused of teaching them Communistic doctrine.” I answered that I faithfully taught the course of study that the board of education has approved. I had never gone beyond that. They didn’t believe me. They asked me the same question over and over and over again. I referred to the course of study, which I held in my hand, time and time again. I said, “Gentlemen, please read this. This is what I followed in all my classes.”
I was the first of the public high school teachers in California to be so investigated. During those four days of hearings, the local and Los Angeles papers ran headlines—“Red Teacher Investigated by Un-American Activities Committee.”
After I appeared, the Los Angeles teachers’ union demanded that the board of education appoint four principals to hold a public session to hear any parent, teacher, or concerned alumnus testify about the accusations made against myself and the other teachers. The union, parents, and alumni all came to my defense in great numbers. There were more than three hundred graduates who left their work to come and testify. The students talked about what they’d learned, and the parents about how happy their kids were at school. After the principals’ hearings, I was cleared of all accusations.
The teacher investigations were an educational tragedy. But it went along with what President Truman was saying when he initiated the Cold War: we must be sure that teachers and educators are on the side of our government. The start of the Cold War meant tragedy in many lives. One teacher in New York burnt herself. An elementary teacher committed suicide; she couldn’t stand the publicity. [Begins to cry.] In California, a Stanford professor with four children killed himself when he received a summons. I know of one Ph.D. who became a truck driver. The vice president of our teachers’ union, a brilliant teacher, became a salesman of washing machines. Isn’t that disgraceful?
The teaching profession as a whole was frightened into submissiveness. At one point, a bunch of us had written to Albert Einstein and said, “What shall we do?” He wrote back, “Become plumbers, become anything, but do not sign the loyalty oath.” To us, it was the beginning of American fascism.
After I was exonerated, I stayed on at Canoga Park. But one of my students came from a very prominent, very wealthy Republican family. The mother was a member of the National Republican Women’s Committee. Her son was incredibly infantile. After about six weeks of table-pounding, the way a baby does on a high chair to get attention, I went down to the local furniture store and borrowed a high chair for a couple of days. I brought it into school and told my students, “Class, I hope you will understand that I am not trying to ridicule a member of this class. But I must cure him of this childish behavior.” I called the young man forward and I said, “During this class today, you must sit in this chair.” He laughed and the class laughed, and he sat in the chair. Well, the mother, as I said a very prominent Republican, heard of this and was outraged by my audacity, as she put it. She went to the principal and said [pounds on table for emphasis], “This teacher has to go.”
Within a very short time, I was summoned to the superintendent’s office in downtown L.A. He told me, “Mrs. Eisenberg, you’ve got to leave that school.” I asked why. He said, “For various reasons, but I want you to make the request for a transfer.” I consulted my union and they told me to do it. I agreed, under the condition that I could choose my school. I wanted to teach at Fairfax High School [located in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood]. During this period, Jewish actors and Jews in general, above everyone else, were being summoned by the committees. Although my family never went to synagogue—we were too poor to pay the dues and too proud to admit it—we held our heritage sacred. After everything that had happened, I just wanted to be with my people. So I was assigned, at my choice, to Fairfax High.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. Once, as I stood on a corner in downtown L.A. and distributed leaflets, the FBI drove by every fifteen minutes photographing me. For years, they came to my house, attempting to interview me. I always said no and slammed the door in their faces.
I wasn’t conscious of being followed, but I know it must have happened. Once, while testifying in front of one of the committees, the license plate of a car, purportedly my own, was cited. It couldn’t have been mine, because at the time I didn’t know how to drive. The agents made lots of mistakes, dozens of errors with names and places. They weren’t the best trained.
I had three and a half marvelous years of teaching at Fairfax High. Freely, I talked about everything that was going on: the hearings and my own beliefs. Then in 1952 I was summoned again before a state committee—the Burns Committee, this time.
Rabbi Cohen, a close friend of mine whose children were in one of my classes, organized a public meeting. Some of my students wrote a pamphlet called Why Are They Attacking My Teacher? Others distributed leaflets announcing the meeting. They wrapped them in newspaper, standing on the four corners of campus to pass them out, because the principal would not allow any distribution of leaflets on school grounds. I still have one of them, which I will treasure to my dying day [voice breaking]. The meeting was held in a theater, and it was packed. It was decided that Frances Eisenberg was not a menace to this community, or to any community. They did all that they could. But I was dismissed in February 1954 for “unprofessional conduct.”
The school administration knuckled under to the investigating committees and the board of education. They knew in advance that I was going to be fired. But I never was called in and asked “What are you teaching?” by anybody.
I was dismissed at a public meeting that the board held, crowded by my supporters. Police and plainclothesmen by the dozens in the hallway. When I exited from that room, a plainclothesman grabbed me by the shoulder and a policeman in uniform threw him aside and stood there beside me.
There were some loud voices of opposition there. As I sat there, I couldn’t believe that after all those years of such devotion to my students and to my profession, I was being fired. I could no longer teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It was a shock.
Afterwards, I went out to educate the community about what was going on in the schools. The teachers’ union didn’t have enough to pay our lawyers’ fees, and we had to get the money somewhere. I was chairman of the Teachers’ Defense Committee for four years, from 1954 to 1958. I talked to more than ten thousand people. I kept a notebook of every organization, every house meeting, and the numbers of people that I addressed in the course of raising funds for our union lawyers. I talked at union halls and homes. These weren’t rich people—Beverly Hills and Bel Air never called me for a meeting—they were working-class, many of them very sympathetic to my political views.
My children did not understand why their father would not let them go to any of the public meetings that were held on my behalf. My husband said, “They don’t understand enough of the political implications. I don’t want them photographed. I don’t want them identified. I want to keep them as safe as possible.” I concurred.
I became a tutor and taught hundreds of children by personal recommendation. I became quite famous. [Laughs.] People who had not supported me as a public school teacher sent me their children to be educated. They paid me so well that I am able to be comfortable in my old age. So in a way, the committee did me a favor! [Laughs delightedly.]
I’m proud that I’m an American. Look how I flourished in this country, despite all of its wars and depressions. I’ve had a good life, and I want that life for every person in this country, especially the youth.
Thirty years later, in 1986, five of us decided to initiate a legal action. We went before a Republican judge of the superior court, and we won. The judge ruled that the Los Angeles board of education had acted unconstitutionally in dismissing us. As a group, we were awarded two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, forty percent of which went to the lawyer. I promptly had a big party. [Laughs.] We celebrated not the financial victory, although the money was welcome, but the moral and educational victory. That will always remain sweet to my heart.
Jean Wilkinson’s journey began in 1952 when her husband, Frank, was called before California’s little HUAC for refusing to reveal his political associations. Jean was blacklisted until 1965 for her own refusal to reveal her political beliefs. (For more on Jean and Frank Wilkinson, see under “The Fight Against HUAC.”)
When Frank and I were first married and undergraduates at UCLA in ’39 or ’40, the Red Squad raided the campus and took away some people I knew, the student body president and two or three others. Their crime was that they wanted a debating organization, one that would be open to all ideas.
The provost suspended them. I knew the students but I didn’t even know what the word “Communist” meant. There was one woman named Celeste Strack,1 who was an avowed Communist, but I didn’t know her, just her name.
Then I came up here to Cal Berkeley, got my teaching credential, taught a year up in Winters, and then back to Canoga Park to teach. My principal at the time, a really wonderful person, a Republican from Kansas, called me in one day and said, “You know, the local chapter of Associated Farmers2 have been complaining that you were involved in that Red riot at UCLA.” I said I wasn’t, I told him what had happened. He said, “Well, why don’t you just go and explain it to this Protestant minister who’s a member of this club, he’s very decent.”
So Frank and I drove out, and he was very decent and very nice. He said, “These fellows are the kind that hit you over the head with a baseball bat and ask questions later.” Frank told him about his background, the Methodist Church and his father’s activities in cleaning up vice in Los Angeles, and I told him that my mother and father were both schoolteachers and raised in the Presbyterian Church. We were just getting along fine, then he said, “Do you mind telling me, are you Communists?” I remember Frank leaning forward and saying, “I don’t mind telling you, I’m not.” I didn’t know beans, I couldn’t have defined the word “communism” for you. But I said, “Well, I do mind telling you, because I think that’s my right of privacy as an American citizen. When I go to vote, nobody has to know how I vote, so I’m not going to tell you.”
Then in 1952 Frank was called before the state Un-American Activities Committee because at a housing authority hearing he had refused to say whether he was a Communist or not. In the press reports, the committee is quoted as saying that they discovered that Frank Wilkinson’s wife is a schoolteacher so why not subpoena her. It was on that kind of basis that I was called to testify in front of the Tenney Committee. They actually held the hearings out there in the school. I was on leave at the time, because I was pregnant and got polio while I was pregnant.
These committees look for every little tie. They took the fact that I was a UCLA graduate and tied me into this ridiculous Red Scare thing on campus, which I had no part in. They make these great leaps, because you were in the vicinity at the time then you must have been part of it. So it’s almost like the making of a radical. I began to feel that if that’s what a radical or a Communist was, maybe I was one—because all the good things that I wanted and believed in, these people were attacking. They were calling me a Communist, whether or not I knew what the word meant or what the organization was like.
But the hearings had nothing to do with education. And in fact, Frances Eisenberg was dragged in when she wrote a letter of protest about that hearing. Then I tried to help Frances by recalling that incident where she was called a dirty Jew by the Nofzigers.3 So Frances and I were implicated early, before the Dilworth cases,4 and were fired before the other teachers were.
At the hearing, I refused to answer their questions on the grounds that they were investigating Frank and I was not going to talk about my politics. I was fired immediately, but the school board had to follow the tenure laws, which allowed us a year and a half or two years to defend ourselves and to go through the courts.
We challenged the case, which went to the California Superior Court. I remember this white-haired judge named Thomas White, a good Catholic soul, who said that I had been sowing the dragon seeds of treason in the classroom. Isn’t that lovely? And of course that really made me mad, because it had nothing to do with teaching or what kind of a teacher I was, it was not the point. I have a clipping from the Examiner quoting William Hearst on these great judges that have been so brave to damn these terrible people in the classroom. Again, saying that we were bad teachers, ruining the kids, when the question of our teaching, of course, never came up.
At the time, I belonged to a very prestigious academic sorority, Delta Kappa Gamma. Although I was a lot younger than most of them—many of them had their doctorates and taught in colleges—I was supposedly being groomed to be president. They sent me out to speak for the group, fighting the attacks on education. So they were quite progressive. I remember having a discussion with them a few months before I was called, in which I explained that if I were ever subpoenaed I would take the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer. When the hearings came about, they began getting cold feet very fast and wrote me saying I should resign. I replied that I hadn’t done anything to make me want to resign—“If you want me out then you have to expel me.”
So they sent a letter to all the members, calling for a vote on whether I should be in or out, and I was put out of the organization. I’m sure the vote was overwhelmingly against me—in those days, everybody was terrified of losing their jobs. But I have one letter from a member who was very prominent in statewide education. She wrote them back and said, “I am not familiar with Jean, I don’t think I would know her if I met her on the street, but obviously she had qualities that made you want her to join and stay in the organization, and I don’t see that she’s done anything to nullify this situation, so I refuse to vote for this.”
To be expelled, that hurt the most to me personally. I admired these women and felt they had the guts to fight the good fight in terms of education. For them to be so frightened and to run at the first encounter was pretty hard to take.
I remember when my principal was down at the board of education for a meeting, other principals would come to her and ask, “What’s it like having a Communist on your staff? What does she look like?” As though I had a tail and horns. My principal was a very loyal and good friend and a believer in civil liberties. In the last stages, when they had decided they were going to fire me but they had to wait so many months to let it take effect, they said I should work in the files to keep me away from the children. The funny part was that I was teaching in a school for delinquent girls on the east side of Los Angeles. It was a great job and I loved it, but not many people wanted to deal with these tough customers. So my principal said, “No, Jean’s my best teacher, and I’m not going to give her up until I have to, so I’ll keep her in the classroom.”
I found some letters from the girls at that school. These were mostly Mexican-American kids, and there’s a certain style in their writing. They don’t know how to spell, but express themselves they did. One of them offered to go down and beat the shit out of the board of education, which I thought was the best offer I’d had.
They called me Wilkey, when they weren’t calling me Wilkey-Balls. “Hi, Wilkey-Balls.” This was their tough talk; these are not ladies, these are women. But in this letter one just said, “How are we going to pass our test? You’re not here, it’s like you’ve failed us, how come?” But she said, “You really did the right thing, Wilkey, to stand by your husband.” The loyal-wife syndrome was strong in their culture and they thought that was a beautiful thing I had done. [Laughs.]
So I stayed on until Christmas Eve, when some lackey in the board of education called and said, “This is to notify you that you won’t be going back to school.” After that, I had to find another job. I went to work in private schools. A lot of people who own private schools are interested in different approaches to education. They also don’t have much money and therefore don’t pay their teachers very much. So the salaries were pretty pitiful, and of course I’m a trained secondary school teacher, I didn’t know how to teach little kids. And I had kids that were emotionally disturbed, so I had to learn to deal with that. Then I would go to homes and tutor kids who were having problems in school.
I was thinking just this last day or two, what has been the effect of McCarthyism on my life? Financial, for God’s sake. Because when I finally did break out of the blacklist in 1965 and got a job teaching in Berkeley, they would only credit me for five years of teaching, which put me way down in the salary schedule.
I’d had at least fifteen years’ experience, but that didn’t count, because I was teaching in private schools. If I had continued in public schools and accrued automatic raises, I would have gotten a much better salary. My retirement is based on what I made in public schools, so I have a very low pension, and that means that I’m broke. I realize more and more as I get older that my colleagues have security and their children have security, and they’re able to do things for their children.
The lawsuit that Frances Eisenberg took part in didn’t include me. I was already teaching in the Berkeley public schools, and the point of their suit was to get back into the public schools. They won and also got some money. So I didn’t participate, I would be glad to, though. I’d like to sue them now for back pay. I could use it.
1These included the Jefferson School of Social Science (New York), the Tom Paine School of Social Science (Philadelphia), the Sam Adams School (Boston), the Abraham Lincoln School (Chicago), the Michigan School of Social Science (Detroit), the Joseph Wedmeyer School of Social Science (St. Louis), the Seattle Labor School and the Pacific Northwest Labor School (Seattle), John Reed Labor Studies (Portland), the Ohio School of Social Science (Cleveland), the California Labor School (San Francisco), and the People’s Educational Center (Los Angeles).
1Lee Alvin Du Bridge, president (1946–69) of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where Pauling taught for more than twenty years.
2In 1954, it was revealed that a number of scholars had research grants either withheld or canceled, without charges or hearings, on instructions of Mrs. Oveta Culp Hobby, the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As late as 1969, HEW was still maintaining a blacklist, barring many distinguished scholars from advisory panels.
1The Seabury Committee (1930–31), headed by Judge Samuel Seabury, investigated municipal corruption in New York City. Its findings sparked a powerful reform movement and brought about the fall of Mayor Jimmy Walker.
2The president of Queens at that time was John J. Theobald. For more on Theobald, see Harvey Job Matusow under “Hounds.”
3American Association of University Professors.
4Father Charles Edward Coughlin (1891–1979), the pro-fascist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-New Deal “radio priest,” gained an audience of millions during the thirties. He was silenced by the Roman Catholic Church in 1942.
1A worldwide peace petition launched out of Stockholm, Sweden, in March 1950 by the World Peace Congress. After an American organization, the Peace Information Center, printed and distributed 485,000 such petitions, the Justice Department indicted five of the PIC’s leaders for failing to register as agents of a foreign power. Among those led off in handcuffs was the eighty-three-year-old scholar W.E.B. Du Bois.
2The remaining three were Clement Markert, zoology; Mark Nickerson, pharmacology; and Nathaniel Coburn, mathematics.
3After cooperating with HUAC in 1954, the future Nobel laureate was denied a promotion in 1955 on political grounds. Klein resigned, concerned, he said, with “a serious deficiency of academic freedom” at Michigan.
4Chandler’s father, Horace Bancroft Davis, had been a conscientious objector during World War One and a member of the Party from 1931 to 1950. He was fired for his politics from the University of Kansas City in 1952, and subsequently from Benedict College and Shaw University.
5Cited for contempt of Congress in 1947, Josephson, a legal adviser to the Party, challenged HUAC’s right to exist by refusing to be sworn in.
6Barenblatt had invoked the First Amendment before HUAC a few weeks after Davis had. In the Barenblatt decision, the court ruled that because of the Cold War, Congress could ask questions about political affiliations that “in a different context would certainly have raised constitutional issues of the gravest character.”
7Caught up in the Klaus Fuchs-Harry Gold atom spy hysteria that eventually swept away the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alfred Dean Slack, at the time of his arrest in 1950, was a $75-a-week assistant superintendent at a Syracuse paint factory. He was never a member of the Party, nor accused of atomic espionage; his arrest was immediately connected with what Time magazine termed “the plot and counterplot by which Russia had stolen U.S. atomic secrets.” What Slack had done, by his own admission, was pass ordnance data to Gold in 1943–44. The information concerned RDX, an explosive developed prior to World War One. Even though the report he gave Gold was composed from public information, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
1An independent journal of Marxist scholarship established in 1936 and listed as a subversive publication by HUAC in 1944.
2For more about the FBI Counterintelligence Program, see M. Wesley Swearingen under “Hounds.”
1Allen Zoll, a professional anti-Communist and prewar fascist, published a series of reports on “Red-ucators” in schools. Despite the inaccuracy of his charges, at least one major university consulted this work, as did apparently the SISS.
2William R. Jenner was the ultraconservative Republican from Indiana who greeted General MacArthur’s dismissal with the charge that “this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie . . . which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. . . . Our only choice is to impeach President Truman to find out who is the secret invisible government.”
3Riess was fired from his tenured job at Hunter College after taking the Fifth before the McCarran Committee in 1952.
1Almost forgotten now, the Tom Mooney case was an international cause célèbre for radicals, trade unionists, and defenders of civil liberties through the 1920s and 1930s. A radical Socialist and secretary of the International Workers Defense League, Mooney was framed with perjured testimony for a fatal bomb attack on the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade on July 22, 1916. After his death sentence was commuted, he languished in San Quentin for twenty-one years until he was pardoned by Governor Olson in 1939. He died in 1942, having spent his last two years bedridden with illnesses that developed in prison.
2An Oscar-winning short made in 1945 dealing with themes of racial discrimination.
3Never the Examiner indeed. The San Francisco Examiner was the flagship of the archcon-servative Hearst newspaper chain and a bitter enemy of anything tinged with pink. Radicals on protest marches would steer themselves past the Examiner offices just to thumb their noses at the building.
4The five corporations of the Hawaii sugar cartel—Castle & Cook, Alexander & Baldwin, Theo. H. Davies, C. Brewer, and Amfac (which began as the German firm H. Hackfield). The Big Five completely controlled Hawaii’s economic and political life until World War Two. The multiracial organizing efforts of the ILWU finally broke their stranglehold on the islands.
5California’s Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, steered by Jack B. Tenney.
6The federal harassment of the California Labor School began in 1948 with Attorney General Clark’s announcement to the press that he was placing the school on his list of subversive organizations. The Treasury Department then rescinded the school’s tax exemption, demanded back taxes from 1942 to 1948, and seized the school’s bank account. In 1954, Attorney General Brownell ordered the school to register as a Communist front under the McCarran Act of 1950; the school refused. By March 1956, when the Subversive Activities Control Board ruled that the school was “dominated by Communists,” there was little money left to appeal the ruling.
7The California Labor School closed its doors for the last time on May 5, 1957, aided by the padlocks installed by the IRS, whose stated purpose was to forestall an announced May Day celebration and fund-raising book sale.
1A left-wing Socialist and native Russian from Odessa, Trachtenberg took part in the revolution of 1905 as a young man of twenty. Emigrating to the United States the following year, he was naturalized in 1914. An early member of the Communist Party, he was convicted in 1952 under the Smith Act and sentenced to three years in prison.
2Contrary to the prevailing logic of the witch-hunt era, Selsam, in the early thirties, was recruited into the Party by one of his students.
3Author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other influential crime novels, Hammett was imprisoned for six months for refusing to divulge a list of contributors to the bail fund of the Civil Rights Congress. In fact, Hammett hadn’t a clue as to who was on the list or where it was, but refused on principle to say so.
4Two of the leading black women writers of the period, Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry both wrote for Freedom, Paul Robeson’s Harlem newspaper, and were firm supporters of W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1959, Hansberry became the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun.
5Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).
6National executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, general manager of the Daily Worker, and trustee of the Jefferson School. In 1954, Patterson was jailed for contempt for failing to provide a grand jury with CRC records he claimed he did not possess.
7The McCarran Internal Security Act (1950) created an administrative nightmare for heretical organizations. Justice Hugo Black described it bluntly: “The plan of the Act is to make it impossible for an organization to continue to function once a registration order is issued against it. To this end, the Act first provides crushing penalties to insure complete compliance with the disclosure requirements of registration. . . . ” The act then established penalties for not registering as a “Communist-action” or “Communist-front” organization—$10,000 and/or five years in prison for each day of failure to register.
1Once strongly associated with the Left, Tenney turned Right with a vengeance as head of California’s little HUAC—the Tenney Committee. See Dorothy Healey under “The Fall of the Communist Party” for more on Jack Tenney.
2Later press secretary under President Nixon.
3The American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
1Later a national leader of the Young Communist League, Strack resigned from the Party in 1958, along with twenty-five other leading Communists, in protest against the CP’s growing isolation and rigidity.
2While the Associated Farmers of California began in May 1934 as a harsh countermeasure to the growing unionization of agricultural workers, its presence quickly became characteristic of all strikes throughout the state. It was financed by Pacific Gas and Electric, Safeway Stores, and a large number of banks, railroads, oil companies, realty firms, farm implement manufacturers, and food packers; its methods included large-scale surveillance, strikebreaking, and vigilante violence.
3Refers to the family of Lyn Nofziger, later press secretary to Richard Nixon. See Frances Eisenberg earlier in this chapter for more on this story.
4Named after legislation sponsored by California State Senator Nelson S. Dilworth. The Dilworth Act of 1953 stipulated that all teachers must take a non-Communist oath and that any who refused to testify would be dismissed.