There was something about the word “peace” that raised the collective hackles of the Inquisition. For them it conjured not the absence of war but the face of the enemy. It signified capitulation, defeat, the global victory of the hated Kremlin.
Thus HUAC in 1956 explained the objectives “of all these misnamed ‘peace’ groups: the dissemination of Communist propaganda aimed at discrediting the United States and promoting a dangerous relaxation in the ideological and military strength of our country.”
In fact, the American peace movement long predated the existence of the Communist Party and has drawn its support from a wide variety of philosophies. Activities first began in the early nineteenth century among religious and utopian groups. Within the social movements of the 1840s and 1850s, issues of peace figured highly, along with women’s rights, abolitionism, and temperance. As the United States took on the “white man’s burden” with the invasion of the Philippines in 1898, anti-imperialist movements drew upon a wide circle of intellectuals and writers, among them Mark Twain. Opposition to the American entry into World War One was carried by religious pacifists and radical socialists, among them labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who in 1920 campaigned for the White House from his prison cell and received 900,000 votes.
In the 1920s and up to the mid-1930s, the Communist Party worked the anti-imperialist front largely in isolation. But the sectarian barriers were flexible enough to allow a coalition of Communists, Socialists, and religious activists to protest the American invasion of Nicaragua in 1926.
In the late 1940s the most visible peace campaigning was found in Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. A significant bloc of New Dealers rejected the Cold War confrontationism of the Truman administration and its equation of “freedom” with the international freedom of American business. Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign took aim at the Cold War, but quickly became one of the main targets of Red Scare reaction. In 1949, what remained of the Left carried the banner of peace against the unpopular Korean War, but was almost entirely isolated by pro-Cold War sentiment.
Into this relative vacuum came the pacifists. Imprisoned by the hundreds as conscientious objectors during World War Two, they forged new links in subsequent years and exerted considerable influence on the East and West Coasts. Pacifica Radio, in the San Francisco Bay Area, brought anarcho-pacifists together with progressives. Beat poet and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti played an important role as an impresario of peace, along with another bookman, Roy Kepler. Both City Lights Books of San Francisco and Kepler’s Books of Menlo Park were at the center of West Coast activism for decades; the latter was firebombed a number of times during the Vietnam War. Intertwined with this milieu was the folk music revival, which was strongly attacked as Red-tinged for its antiwar sentiments. Sparked by Pete Seeger and the Weavers in the 1950s, it was carried on by Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. Baez, an early and outspoken critic of America’s efforts in Vietnam, founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence under the direction of her Gandhian mentor Ira Sandperl. In turn the institute played a significant role in the civil rights movement, training many of Martin Luther King’s activists in the techniques of nonviolent resistance.
Concomitant with this activity was the growing opposition to nuclear testing and the arms race. The pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation widely circulated a petition calling for an end to testing. Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell united prominent scientists worldwide with their appeal of 1955. (Similar efforts by Nobel laureate Linus Pauling earned him years of harassment from the federal government.) A flowering of peace institutes and research organizations ensued, many with radical pacifist connections. Direct action was involved as well, such as the 1960 resistance of two thousand New Yorkers to the annual Civil Defense Drill. This matched the rebirth of student activism, which was inspired by the successes of the civil rights movement. The Student Peace Union, founded in 1959, circulated petitions and organized marches and rallies.
It is no surprise, then, that nearly every group calling for “peace” or “friendship” or an end to nuclear weaponry found itself harassed by the FBI and listed by HUAC as a subversive organization. The Justice Department ran guard for the State Department, marking for suppression such organizations as the Council for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy and the Council for Pan-American Democracy. (Both opposed the Truman Doctrine.) The Peace Information Center, the American Peace Crusade, and many similar groups were ordered to register as foreign agents with the Subversive Activities Control Board. The Peace Information Center, for one, decided a court battle was a luxury it could not afford and voted to dissolve itself.1
The Vietnam War sparked off the largest resurgence of radical activity since the 1930s and the most massive campaign of anti-Left suppression since the early 1950s. The FBI, CIA, Military Intelligence, and local law enforcement Red Squads collected information on student and community dissidents through informers, wiretaps, mail checks, and surveillance. Files on one and a half million Americans were collected by the government during this period. Agents operated virtually unchecked to infiltrate and disrupt organizations. As early as 1962, HUAC was busy investigating all stripes of the new radicals, from the progressive Women Strike for Peace to later Maoists and Yippies. But this was a different country from a decade earlier, and a new generation. The widespread youth culture disdained the establishment watchdogs and were buoyed by an alternative economy largely immune to HUAC’s bullying. Who could be blacklisted from an underground newspaper or a commune? New Left radicals hauled before the Inquisition were delighted to affirm their ideological allegiances and used the opportunity as a forum for their own beliefs and attitudes.
The Yippies, who were of a more playful bend, transformed their hearings into guerrilla theater. Jerry Rubin testified dressed as a soldier in the Revolutionary War and once attempted to attend Dave Dellinger’s hearing clad in a Santa Claus suit. For his appearance, Abbie Hoffman equipped himself with a shirt made from an American flag.
For his work against nuclear proliferation and for world peace, Pauling was denied a passport and called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. A two-time Nobel Prize winner (Chemistry in 1954, Peace in 1962), Pauling was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1972. For more on Linus Pauling, see under “Red-ucators.”
Not long after the war, I was asked to speak at the Rotary Club in Hollywood. I was known as a popular speaker on scientific subjects. So I gave a talk about what the atom is and what the nucleus of the atom is, and what nuclear fission is; how it’s possible for one pound of substance to undergo fission and produce twenty million times as much explosive energy as you would get from a pound of TNT or dynamite. So far as I remember, I didn’t say much beyond just the aspect of atomic physics.
I was asked to give more talks, and pretty soon I was saying: “It seems to me that with the tremendous explosive and destructive capability of these weapons, we’d better be sensible and stop going to war between great nations.” So that was how I got started talking about nuclear weapons and later about world peace.
Then I was asked to join the board of trustees of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, usually called the Einstein Committee—Einstein was the chairman. The whole committee consisted of seven or eight atomic scientists. The committee collected about five hundred thousand dollars and used it for making a film about atomic bombs and for various educational activities. The committee ceased to function when the McCarthy period came along, but I kept working. My estimate is that I spent half my time doing research and half my time working in this field of social, political, and economic questions and giving hundreds of lectures over the years. I don’t really know how many. At one time I think I estimated fifty lectures on world peace a year.
In 1951, I was on my way to Israel, at invitation of their research laboratory there, and I had several hours’ layover in Paris. I decided to go over to the Sorbonne and see people that I knew. I was talking with a professor there who said, “You ought to go talk to Madame Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Marie Curie. She has something interesting to show you.”
So I went over. She gave me a letter. She was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and had applied for membership in the American Chemical Society, of which I had been president a couple of years before. So the letter she got back informed her that she was being rejected on grounds of moral turpitude. The charge was that she was married to a Communist. I wrote a letter that was published in Chemical & Engineering News saying, “Here we have Madame Joliot-Curie, who’s applied for membership. She is a Nobel laureate; her mother was a Nobel laureate; her father was a Nobel laureate; her husband is a Nobel laureate. She tells me that she is not a Communist.” Madame Joliot-Curie never became a member of the American Chemical Society. I think it’s rather embarrassing.
In 1952, I wanted to go to a meeting, a symposium arranged by the Royal Society of London to discuss my discoveries on the structure of proteins. I was to be the first speaker, and people from various countries working on protein structure were the other speakers. My passport had expired, so I had to apply again. I didn’t get the passport. We got as far as New York and Washington, my wife and I, led on by the Passport Office, who kept saying things like “When you get to New York, you can get the passport,” and then I went down to Washington and at the last minute they said, “No, we’re not issuing the passport.” So we went back to Pasadena. I missed the symposium. Some say that if I’d been there, I would have discovered the double helix in place of Watson and Crick. I won’t go into it, but if I’d gone to that meeting in London and seen Franklin’s X-ray photographs, which Watson and Crick saw . . . well, who knows?
I asked on my various stays in Washington why I had been denied, talking to the authorities and the officials in the Passport Department. The first answer I got was “Not in the best interests of the United States.” This wasn’t very illuminating. Then they said, “Your anti-Communist statements haven’t been strong enough.” They couldn’t say, “You haven’t made any anti-Communist statements.” I was having a fight with the Communists at the same time. The Soviets had come out in 1949 with an attack on me, saying that my ideas about chemistry were incompatible with dialectical materialism, that no patriotic Soviet scientist should use them. The professor who had translated my book The Nature of the Chemical Bond into Russian was fired and never got his professorship back. One of the young professors who attacked me got his professorship. So I was persona non grata in the early 1950s in both the Soviet Union and the United States.
The following year, I was invited by Nehru1 to visit universities and scientific laboratories in India and to help dedicate a new scientific institute, and I accepted. I also accepted the invitations to give a set of lectures in Greece and then a set in Jerusalem. So, we went to the Passport Office in New York, and they said, “Come back tomorrow, we don’t have word.” And then they said, “You have to go to Washington and see the authorities in the Passport Division.” So I sent a cable to Athens canceling my lectures. We went to Washington about the 18th of December, and for several days I went to the Passport Office. And then they said, “Come back after Christmas.” So I sent a cable to Israel, canceling. Then I went back after Christmas and they said, “Come back after New Year’s.” So I sent a cable to Nehru, canceling. By this time my wife and I were so unhappy and discouraged, being in Washington, D.C., on Christmas, with this hanging over our heads, we just gave up and went back to Pasadena.
Senator Morse of Oregon introduced legislation that required the State Department to set up a system whereby anyone whose passport was denied could appeal. The State Department went ahead and set up an appeal board. But I couldn’t appeal, because Mrs. Shipley, the director of the Passport Division, never refused to issue the passport.2 She was too smart for me. She never officially denied me a passport; she just wouldn’t issue me one. So I had nothing to appeal! [Laughs.]
The next year, 1954, I was reinvited back to India, and I applied again for the passport. I had had one issued a couple of times in between, limited usually to two months. In each case, I had participated in important scientific meetings. So I sent in an application to go to India again, and it was just denied. I thought, “Well, the heck with it. I’ll notify Nehru that I can’t come.” But then it was announced, in late October of 1954, that I was to be given the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The New York Times carried an article—“Is Professor Pauling going to be allowed to go to Stockholm to get his Nobel Prize?” The State Department didn’t have the guts to stick to their policy, so I received the passport through the mail. That was the last time I’ve had passport problems.
In 1957, I issued a press release that two thousand American scientists had signed a petition to stop testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Two days later, I received a subpoena from the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee ordering me to appear in Washington. They were investigating possible Communist influences in the bomb test petition. I sent them a letter saying that I was scheduled to make a trip to Europe to give some scientific talks and asking that they postpone the hearing for a month or two. I got back word that they had canceled the hearing for that date. It was two or three years later—’60, I think—that they again subpoenaed me to testify.
Senator Dodd, the chairman of the committee, had written an article called “Eight Fallacies of Nuclear Test Ban,” and presented it so it appeared in the official proceedings of the Senate. He said that I should bring with me all of the letters and documents by means of which signed copies of the petition had been communicated to me.
I was questioned for several hours about which organizations I’d been with, whether I had sent a telegram to President Eisenhower asking that the Rosenbergs not be executed. All sorts of stuff—sometimes about things I couldn’t remember having done. Finally, the senator said, “You were ordered to bring with you the names of all the people who had signed your petition.” I said, “Well, I did bring the names of all of the people who signed the petition. I’ve given them to you. You have them. I have three big bound volumes of signatures.” He turned to his aide and discussed the matter with him a moment, and then he said, “You were ordered to bring with you all of the letters or other documents by means of which these signed copies of the petition were communicated to you. Are you prepared to comply with this order?” I said, “No, I’m not willing to obey this order. I’m not willing to give you the names of these idealistic young people who are working for world peace, in order for them to be subjected to the sort of harassment that you’re subjecting me to. I am not obeying.”
So then there came the moment when we had to wait. My wife told me later that during noon break, a young man had rushed up to her and said, “Is your husband going to give the committee the names of those people?” And she said, “I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait and see.” finally Senator Dodd just said, “Very well,” and went on to some other matter. So I was off the hook, instead of a year in jail for contempt of Congress, which I hadn’t been looking forward to with much pleasure. Of course, even if the committee had recommended that I be found guilty of contempt, the whole Congress might have rejected it. I had published an advertisement in the Washington Post explaining why I was not going to give the committee these names, and many newspaper editors published editorials supporting me rather than the committee. So the committee decided they’d better back off.
Initially, we wrote this petition as an appeal by American scientists to the governments of the world to stop testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. But after word of it got out, I began getting copies of the petition with “American” crossed out and signatures of scientists all over the world. So I had a lot of these appeals mimeographed with “American” left out, and I got a book, Universities of the World, and went through it and picked out the names of one person, usually a biologist or a biochemist, in almost every country in the world, and sent copies of this petition around. So by the next summer or spring, I had nine thousand signatures from all over the world. And my wife and I presented copies of them to Dag Hammarskjöld of the United Nations. Ultimately, when they stopped coming in, we had thirteen thousand signatures from scientists in forty-nine countries. Later, I found a letter in the kitchen of our home that had fallen down behind a desk in the corner. It was from a scientist in the fiftieth country, that had just happened to have got lost.
Up to McCarthy’s time, there had been quite a lot of scientists who had been saying the same thing that I’d been saying: that nuclear war was really too terrible to look forward to in the future. Nearly all of them stopped being active when McCarthy began operating. For one reason, that’s easy to understand. A scientist could say, “Here I am, a chemist or a physicist or a biologist, and my job is to teach and carry on research in this science. It’s not my job to get involved in politics, and so why should I continue doing it, putting myself in jeopardy?” Of course, some of these people lost their jobs. I was fortunate.
So I’m asked, “Why did you continue?” And one answer that I’ve given sometimes is that I’m just stubborn. I said, “I don’t allow anybody to tell me what to think, except Mrs. Pauling!” [Laughs.] And another answer that I’ve given is that my wife knew me better than I knew myself probably. She always knew not only what I did but why I did it. So I had to keep the respect of my wife.
For a short time I was a member of the national board of directors of SANE.3 Then when McCarthy attacked SANE, Norman Cousins, I guess it was he, replied that there was no need for the government to investigate the people associated with SANE, that they would carry out their own investigations and question members of the board of directors about their beliefs. So I resigned and sent a note saying I didn’t give the chairman of the board of SANE or anybody else the right to question me about my beliefs.
My wife and I argued with two matters in these organizations that we were affiliated with. One, the right of organizations to question individuals; and the other, a policy of not keeping left-wingers out of an organization. We said, “We support any organization working for world peace.” Well, we went to a peace conference in Oxford, England, as representatives of ourselves. We didn’t go as representatives of any organization. And there were representatives of various peace groups that were going to participate in this organization. The Americans objected to the fact that there were going to be some people from behind the Iron Curtain attending the peace conference. And the peace conference was not held. It broke up after the first meeting or two, when there was a fight as to whether the American policy of throwing out the people from behind the Iron Curtain would be followed or not. So my wife and I wrote an article about the Oxford Peace Conference that was published in the journal The Minority of One, in which we said this hardly seems a sensible policy, to be working for world peace but not to be talking with people in the other countries that are working for world peace too. [Laughs.]
I always hesitate to classify myself in respect to political matters, but I’m probably closer to being a socialist than anything else. Of course, the powerful people in the United States are really worried about socialism, not communism. No one has ever thought that the United States suddenly will go Communist, so far as I’m aware. But the Communist scare was a good ploy, a way of stopping the Roosevelt New Deal idea of doing justice to all people; Social Security and a graduated income tax. They’re still fighting, of course, they’re still engaged in dismantling the New Deal.
You know, when I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, Life magazine came out with a half-page editorial, “A Weird Insult from Norway.” An insult to the United States of America, to give me the Nobel Peace Prize, yes. [Laughs.]
A memoirist, poet, and teacher, Edith Jenkins is a longtime activist in the peace movement. “I got into the student Left at UC because I found the world was not as I had thought it was. First into the National Student League, then later the Young Communist League. I got involved in the peace movement in 1933, but it was the San Francisco strike of ’34 that thoroughly radicalized me.”
During the war, I ran a mass meeting for Paul Robeson and Walter Huston on Fair Employment Practices, that was in 1945, towards the end of the war. I know the time because I was very pregnant, and every time Paul Robeson saw me after that, he said, “Edith, you’ve gotten so thin,” and I’d say, “You’ve never seen me when I’m not pregnant."
The whole time I was raising children I was active in the peace movement and active in the PTA, trying to get the PTA to have a more active peace program. I also initiated programs on what was then called Negro History Week and Women’s History. I got interested in the PTA’s history and doing women’s programs for PTA. And then I was active in antiwar organizations of various kinds during that period.
In 1950 there was going to be a World Peace Congress in Sheffield, England.1 My husband, Dave, and I were talking about who should go, and I said, “Why don’t they send some ordinary women, mothers who are interested in peace, instead of just big shots?” And Dave said, “Why don’t you go?”
We were pretty poor then, but Dave had just gotten a settlement over an accident. So in a week’s time we decided that I would go. I represented the Independent Progressive Party there, just because I had to have some organizational designation.
There were about twenty-eight delegates. We went off in a chartered flight, a very old plane. All the water froze on the way over and there was nothing hot to eat. Paul Robeson was supposed to go, but he couldn’t leave the country then, his passport had been taken away. So we took messages from him.
We got to the airport in London, and Scotland Yard came and interviewed us. They said we couldn’t enter England,2 and they wouldn’t let us talk to counsel. We were kept incommunicado overnight. Scotland Yard interviewed us one by one. They asked the woman before me to let them look through her purse. When she demurred, they said, “Well, if you don’t do it, we’ll search you forcibly.” So I went into the bathroom and tore up addresses I had of British friends and flushed them down the toilet.
It had been only the week before that I had decided to go, but what was amazing was when they interviewed me they had a whole dossier on me. They asked me all sorts of questions. They must have had State Department cooperation. I was very frightened. I had left four children behind and didn’t know what was going to happen.
Then we got word that Warsaw would have the congress there. So we flew to Paris and took a train to Eastern Europe. We stopped in Prague for a couple of days, and then we went to Warsaw. In Warsaw, unbelievably, they had worked day and night for forty-eight hours and finished a sort of Peace Palace with huge statues of a woman holding the Picasso dove.
It was a terribly moving congress, and I have to do a double take on it really, because I was so totally uncritical of the Soviet Union at that time. When I look back, I realize that the picture that I received was one that in many ways I would be very skeptical of now, in terms of the . . . Well, there was no question that the peace message was an absolutely sincere and strong one. But the fact that I did not know what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time makes me look back and reevaluate how much I was taken in by what I thought was the totally unrelieved goodwill of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain countries.
But this was shortly after the war, and the women we met in Prague told us of the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union and how they didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry or to dance in the streets. It was very moving, when we were in Poland we saw the remains of the Warsaw ghetto and the statue to the heroes of the uprising. And we went to Jewish theater in Poland, which was amazing; this was before the anti-Semitism in Poland reasserted itself. We met with the Korean women,3 and that was terribly moving as well. They asked us to bring back their message here, and I felt it was a real injunction that we had that role to play.
Joliot-Curie was at the meeting. And I think Shostakovich was there, and J. D. Bernal, the British physicist. He was head of the World Peace Congress for a while, and he was a leading molecular physicist who also wrote an extraordinary book called Science and History. He addressed the American delegation with words of wisdom in which he said, “It’s always very tempting at a delegation like this to take very far-left positions that will subsequently be quoted in your own country. Don’t say anything here that isn’t something that you will stand by when you get home.”
There is a kind of dizziness or excitement in delegations and a feeling of peace and extraordinary camaraderie when you’re with people from all over the world. When we got back to this country, I spoke at one mass meeting. I had never really done any public speaking before, and to my amazement I got a big ovation. And so I did a tremendous amount of speaking against the Korean War, mainly in San Francisco. I spoke sixty-five times the first year at house meetings where people would invite their neighbors. Although they were organized mostly by left-wingers, the people who came wouldn’t necessarily be Left at all.
Then in 1951, I believe, there was a subpoena out for me by the Burns Committee, which was the California House Un-American Committee. As you know, it was perfectly legal to dodge subpoenas, but once you got them you had to appear. As somebody at that time said, it was a question of prestige, and people who didn’t get them suffered from “subpoena envy”!
I was dodging the subpoena, and my children were told to say I was not home. At that time, they ranged in age from I guess fourteen down to three. The process servers hadn’t been able to find me, so they had the police try to present me with a subpoena, which I don’t think was legal at all.
One day, Becky, my oldest daughter, answered the door and said I wasn’t home. The other children were playing in front. Becky called them to come in for dinner, but they didn’t pay any attention to her. Then I heard her shout, “Momma says come in for dinner!” And the process servers were right across the street. [Laughs.] Well, they didn’t catch me at that moment, but then the police stopped my son on the street when he was riding his tricycle and said, “Your mother’s just won a police auction. Can you tell us where we can find her?” Finally they caught up with me, and I appeared before the committee.
We were told not to say anything, just to take the Fifth Amendment. But on the stand I became very angry and I said I want to protest the use of the San Francisco police in serving me a subpoena and harassing my children on the streets. There was a stirring in the whole courtroom, and my lawyer said, “You’d better be prepared to back that up,” so I did. And then I said, “I feel it’s ironic that a woman who’s spent her entire adult life working for peace is being called before this committee for advocating force and violence.” And then there was a great stir, I guess there was applause. Burns said he would clear the courtroom if it didn’t stop.
Our neighbors circulated a petition not to prosecute me for taking the Fifth. All the storekeepers in the neighborhood and a lot of the neighbors signed it. The local butcher said to Dave, “They ought to be investigating the price of meat, not your wife.” That was very moving, very touching.
Then a curious thing happened, a few months after I came back from Warsaw. I don’t remember which side of the Burns Committee hearings this was on. I got two letters in rather rapid succession addressed to “Jean Jenkins, 456 Belve Street.” Both had the wrong address: Belve Street, not Belvedere Street; and the name on my passport said “Jean.” That was the name my family had given me, which I didn’t realize until I got my passport. They had wanted to name me Jean, and my grandfather, who had a German accent, said, “You can’t name her Jean because everybody will call her Sheenie Arnstein.” So they called Edith. But Jean was the only name on my passport.
One letter was from the West Indies, and it said, “Dear Jean, As you know we claim the Congress in Defense of Children was not organized by the Communists, but it was.” And it went on about that. It was signed by someone from the Congress in Defense of Children, which was a group formed shortly after the Warsaw congress, and the signature read, “Yours for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by any means necessary.” Well, we knew this was an attempt to frame me, and I was rather frightened by that. A few weeks later I received another letter from somewhere in Eastern Europe, saying, “Enclosed you will find maps of Shell installations in South America which ought to be blown up, and you are to give these maps to somebody else”—and it specified to whom—“and if you do not, something dreadful will happen to you.” The letter was on the stationery of the CGT, the French trade union organization, signed by Louis Saillant, who was the head of the CGT.
We got this letter to Harry Bridges, who wrote to Saillant, and Saillant said his stationery had been stolen and his signature forged. These letters had been sent all over the world. A man in the Philippines was doing a life sentence because of receiving the same communication. We gave both letters to the postmaster. Handing things over to officials was the last thing we’d do at that time, but we felt we needed to be covered.
I think it must’ve been the CIA. It wasn’t one person who was sending it out, because it came from two different sections of the globe, with the same name and the same mistake in the address. They were doing this because I’d gone to the Warsaw congress and I was speaking against the Korean War.
What was harder for me personally than appearing before the Burns Committee—because you know your adrenaline helps on something like that—was the first PTA meeting I had to go to afterwards. I remember I circled the block three times before I could walk in, because I knew some people would speak to me and some wouldn’t. And some parents wouldn’t let their children play with ours.
When I was in Warsaw, my second daughter, who was seven, was in the Brownie Scouts and I guess she was kind of disturbed about her mother being away. She went to the Brownie meeting to celebrate the birthday of the Brownies, and they were all supposed to make a wish. She said, “I wish I didn’t have to belong to the Brownies!” [Laughs.] And then she said “damn” about something, and they tried to kick her out of the Brownies for saying “damn.” We fought that one through, but it was very very hard on the kids.
Our oldest daughter, who was pretty political by that time even though she was only fourteen, spoke against the Korean War in school, and the teacher put her on the spot, made fun of her in front of the whole class. She was a tough kid, but she ran home from school crying and was terribly upset. Dave and I went to the school to protest. Dave went in ahead of me, and as I was waiting to go in, I heard some teachers saying, “Well, if I were the dean, I just would’ve gotten the FBI down here.”
Then years later we found that when my son was just starting Polytechnic, the same high school where this event had happened with my daughter, the teachers had singled him out to be in the fast-moving class. He was a kid who never tested well, but they also singled kids out that they knew were capable. The other teachers objected. They said no, his parents were Reds and they wouldn’t have him in the accelerated class.
The thing that was really hard in those years was when the doorbell rang and when we wouldn’t know if we were going to be either subpoenaed or taken off to jail. They had taken some people—mothers—off to jail in the middle of the night. It was terribly hard on our kids. They were very brave at the time, but I think they paid for it.
But funny things happened too. I remember when Becky, the oldest one, was in grade school, the Bridges had a big Irish setter that ran into the schoolyard and was jumping on kids, taking their lunches. You know, they’re friendly, dumb dogs. And Becky said, “Oh, I know whose dog that is, that’s Harry Bridges’s dog!” And the principal said, “That’s all I need on the first day of school, to have Harry Bridges’s dog knocking down children!” [Laughs.]
1This did not deter the Attorney General, who responded that it must register even if it did not exist.
1Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), chief political heir to Mahatma Gandhi and first prime minister of independent India; a principal architect of the politics of nonalignment.
2Ruth Shipley and her successor Frances Knight, crusading anti-Communists both, worked assiduously to ensure that any heretic who criticized American foreign policy would be denied the right to travel. Those temerarious enough to associate with or show sympathy to heretics could also be denied a passport. This policy continued unabated until 1958, when the Supreme Court, in the face of ardent opposition from the Eisenhower administration, ruled that the right of travel can be removed only with due process.
3Otherwise known as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, founded in 1957.
1The first congress was held in Paris, April 20–23, 1949. Both were represented by HUAC and SISS as part of an international “Communist ‘peace’ offensive” against the North Atlantic Defense Pact.
2The second World Peace Congress was originally scheduled to be held in Sheffield, England, November 13–19, 1950, but the British government denied visas to many of the delegates and it was moved to Warsaw, Poland, and held on November 16–22.
3The Korean War was on at the time. Presumably these women were from North Korea, which was taking a terrible pounding from American airpower.