ACCORDING TO THE BOOK OF EXODUS, AFTER MOSES LED the Jews out of Egypt and into freedom, he called his followers together to urge them to pass the story of their escape down to their children so the story would never be forgotten. Moses, it seemed, wanted his people to become a nation of educators.
And when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to receive the Word of God—the Ten Commandments—the Bible says that what he didn’t write down, he kept in his head in order to pass it down to others, who were then instructed to pass it down to their children. Teaching history and tradition to others became so ingrained that education became the cornerstone of a Jewish upbringing.
When the people wanted to give Moses their highest honor, they called him “Moses our teacher.” The honorific “rabbi” simply means “teacher.”
Why did Jews care so much about education? Because time after time they were persecuted, and they figured out that for their children to reach their full potential despite all roadblocks thrown their way, they had to be educated. And it was this love of education that helped them survive even after years of pogroms and deportations.
In addition to a love of learning, these Jews, who had fled from czarist Russia, also shared a love of freedom and a hatred of authoritarianism. When the Depression hit, along with the rise of fascism in Europe, many of these Jews joined the Communist Party. Opposed to capitalism and wanting to help those of the working class advance in society, by the mid-1920s the American Communists had replaced any interest in violence or regime change with a concern for social justice. They turned to building labor unions, protested black lynchings, and fought for better living conditions for the poor. By the late 1930s, a broad left-wing movement grew up around the Communist Party, though most who said they were communists did not belong to the party. They were communists with a small c. They sympathized with the party’s goals, but did not want to submit to its discipline. There rose up dozens of organizations fighting for racial equality, freedom for Spain, unions, and social equality. Many Jews, who were communists with a small c, also were devoted to education and to teaching. Though uneducated, their parents insisted that the children study hard in order to live a better life. These offspring gained a love of learning that they wished fervently to pass on to others.
Among the sons of Russian immigrants to Brooklyn imbued with this love of learning and education were four remarkable brothers: Phil, Jack, Moe, and Henry Foner. The oldest, Phil and Jack, twins, became college professors at CCNY, who would later go on to write groundbreaking books on unions and civil rights. Moe was a college administrator. Henry, the surviving brother, began his career teaching high school.
Even though Hitler was the enemy, Russia an ally, and the American communists focused on stopping Nazi totalitarianism, in 1940 the New York State legislature appointed a committee to investigate teachers in New York City colleges and high schools. The committee, headed by two staunch conservatives, Republican state assemblyman Herbert Rapp from Genesee County (between Rochester and Buffalo) and Republican state senator Frederic Coudert from New York City’s Upper East Side, more than anything else wanted to curb the influence of the Jewish teachers who had joined the Communist Party, and were determined to stop the anti–Jim Crow teachings of leftist professors. Some of the outrage was over the fact that CCNY had actually hired a black professor, Dr. Max Yergans, who was a member of the Communist Party. The argument that gained the conservatives their firmest footing was one that appealed to the religious contingent: because communism posits a state without religion, those who joined the Communist Party lacked the religious bona fides to teach. In other words, they didn’t want these left-wing Jews preaching civil rights, equality, and rights of the poor to impressionable kids.
The conservative Christian legislators accused CCNY and Brooklyn College of tossing out any faculty member who was “not in accord with the Godless, material theories” of those running the school system. The loudest protests came from New York Archdiocese cardinal Francis Spellman, Episcopal bishop William Manning, Tammany Hall, and the Hearst newspapers—the Daily Mirror and the New York Journal-American.
It was a ridiculous, absurd argument taken from the Puritan New England handbook, but when fear rages, logic and democracy always suffer. When hundreds of teachers were fired—not for any treasonous act but solely because they had been Communists—the firings were upheld by the Supreme Court until 1957, when the Court finally ruled that such flimsy grounds for dismissal were unconstitutional.
Henry Foner on the steps of his home at 310 South 3rd Street in Williamsburg, after returning from his first day at school at PS 19 in September 1925. Courtesy of Henry Foner
By the time the Rapp-Coudert Committee completed its witch hunt, over eight hundred high school and college teachers had been targeted. All four Foner brothers were thrown out of teaching in 1941 by the second of the Red Scares, which sought to stop men fighting for civil rights, union rights, and social justice, by demonizing them as Communists.
Forty years later, CCNY held a ceremony apologizing to the victims of the Rapp-Coudert witch hunt, including Phil and Jack Foner. Henry Foner, to his credit, rolled with the punches and spent the rest of his life working for others as a union organizer.
Phil, Jack, Moe, and Henry Foner grew up in Williamsburg, sons of immigrant Russian-Polish Jews. Their father owned a horse and wagon in the 1920s, and he used it to deliver seltzer in glass bottles to customers around Brooklyn. He was successful enough that he was able to buy a share in a parking garage on the corner of Pearl Street downtown. In addition to cars, the garage held trucks from various companies. One of them was Brooklyn Edison, and through his connection to the company, Pop Foner was able to get twin sons Phil and Jack jobs turning on and off the street lights in Greenpoint, which adjoined Williamsburg. Each had a special key, and at five in the morning they would go on their respective routes and manually turn off the lights. Then at five at night, they would return and turn them on again.
Another customer was the Simmons Beautyrest Mattress Company, and the family joke was that occasionally a mattress would fall off the truck and land at 310 South Third Street, where they lived. Another customer was a candy company. The father would bring home some candy, which the kids thought tasted like soap, but their mother would tell them, “Listen, don’t be so particular. We got it for nothing, so eat and enjoy it.”
Clair Bee, the basketball coach at Long Island University, was another customer. Bee would give Pop Foner tickets to their home games, which in those days were played in the gym of the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. Basketball was very big in Brooklyn, and in the 1920s and 1930s it was largely a Jewish sport. “Rip” Gerson, who played on the legendary St. John’s Wonder Five, lived down the street from the Foners. His teammates on that team were all Jews—Mac Kinsbrunner, Matty Begovich, Mac Posnack, and Allie Shuckman. According to Henry Foner, the neighborhood joke was that Gerson would go to college carrying only a pair of basketball trunks under his arm. “We never found out if he ever went to class,” said Foner.
Moe Foner, the middle brother, played basketball at Eastern District High School and went on to play at Brooklyn College. He had the distinction of playing against St. Francis in Brooklyn’s very first game at Madison Square Garden.
Moe and Henry would go to the Prospect Hall in the Park Slope section to watch Brooklyn’s professional basketball team, The Visitations. Among the stars who played for the visiting Trenton Tigers was Lou Spindell, a remarkable athlete who had played for City College from 1928 to 1930. Spindell and Henry Foner later would become active members of the teachers’ union.
Henry Foner wasn’t athletic, because as a child he suffered from rickets and had frail legs. Since he also had difficulty dancing, he became a saxophone player so at least he could play at the dances.
For the Foners, the focal point of the community was Public School 19. Like most Jewish immigrant families, his parents placed a great deal of emphasis on education and took great pride in their children’s academic achievements. It was very important that their children go on to college, and there was more than one joke told about the desirability of their becoming either doctors or lawyers.
Eastern District High School, which all four Foner boys attended, had neither a football nor a baseball team, and as a result debate became a very important competitive activity. Evening debates at Eastern District High were events equivalent to football games at other high schools. The entire Foner family would turn out to hear Phil and Jack debate in the school auditorium. One of their opponents was Boys High School’s Gus Tyler, who for years has written a column for the Forward. Back then his name was August Tilove, and he would go on to become education director and vice president of the ILGWU and a close associate of union leader David Dubinsky.
Henry, unable to play basketball like Moe, followed in Phil and Jack’s footsteps and became captain of the Eastern District debate team. He also emulated his brothers by taking up a musical instrument, the alto saxophone.
The four Foners played together in a dance band. Along with Henry, Phil played alto sax, Jack drums, and Moe tenor sax. The boys had two cousins who were undertakers, and the cousins joined a number of community organizations where they became the social chairmen who arranged to hire the Foner band for their parties.
“For years we had steady work,” says Henry Foner.
At the dances they played songs of the Depression, including “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Another song had the lyrics
Here it is Monday
And I’ve still got a dollar—
So why should I holler
When here it is Monday and I’ve still got a dollar.
During the summer the Foner band traveled to the Catskills to work. For several summers Phil and Jack played at a hotel in Monticello, New York, called the Royalton House. Not only did they play at the dances, but, since the musicians at the smaller hotels also provided other entertainment, Phil and Jack did skits in front of the guests, and for those, they needed material.
During the off-season, brothers Moe and Henry would go to the Palace Theater at 47th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, where they would sit in the balcony and watch the routines performed by the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, and Phil Baker. They would write down the jokes and pass them along to Phil and Jack to use over the summer.
Phil and Jack went to the prestigious City College, where they were outstanding students. They were so busy with their Edison Electric job, their music, and their studies that when Henry was twelve, they bought him an Underwood portable typewriter, brought it home, put it on the dining-room table, and told him, “Learn to type.” Henry, a dutiful brother, typed many of their college papers. Later on Henry would go on to teach stenography and typewriting to high school students.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, the Foners weren’t deeply affected, because their father had his seltzer route and his garage, and he hadn’t speculated in the stock market.
“He hadn’t bought stocks, so he didn’t jump off the roof,” said Henry Foner. “We did not lead fancy lives, but I was buying apples rather than selling them.”
What Henry and his brothers were deeply affected by was the growing labor movement and their desire to fight against racial discrimination and Jim Crow. This was also a period when Adolf Hitler came to power, and the threat of fascism hung over the world. Phil and Jack were organizers of the College Teachers’ Union after they became professors at City College. They were also active in another faculty organization, called the Anti-Fascist Association. In addition, they became members of the Communist Party.
“There were reasons so many Jews embraced this movement,” said Henry Foner. “When I became active in the Furrier Union, I learned that the other leaders, Ben Gold, Sam Burt, and Irving Potash, came here as immigrants with backgrounds of activity in leftist movements back in the old country. Another aspect was the emphasis on education, which meant you had a growing intelligentsia among Jewish people, and I have found that educated people tend to be more liberal, more radical than the population as a whole. There were bitter differences between the communists and the socialists that were inherited. We never fully understood why this was. They even had their own newspapers—in the Jewish community there was the Frei Height, the communist newspaper, and the Forward, the socialist newspaper—but in both cases they had the same goal: social justice.”
High school student Henry Foner also was an activist. In 1934 he took part in an annual peace strike conducted by the National Student League. He was on a committee that arranged for an outdoor rally outside Eastern District High School. The speaker that day was Joe Cohen, who later became Joseph Clark, a columnist for the Daily Worker. In the years before Hitler and the Spanish Civil War, the issue was a movement for peace. Henry Foner was part of the movement, which asked students to sign the Oxford Pledge that they would not join the ROTC or go to war.
When Foner entered CCNY in the fall of 1935, he immediately became involved in a student protest to save the job of Morris Schappes, a popular English teacher accused of using his teaching position to indoctrinate the students with leftist dogma. Apparently, the chairman of the English Department, a Professor Horne, had visited his class while Schappes was lecturing about the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He read the lines:
Men of England—heirs of glory
Heroes of unwritten story
Nurselings of one mighty mother
Hopes of her and one another
Rise like lions out of slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew,
For you are many, they are few.
Horne—stupid, jealous, or vindictive—charged Schappes, who was one of the most popular professors on campus, with indoctrinating his class with radical ideas, and he was fired. Foner and several thousand students couldn’t believe such a farce could take place at their prestigious school, and in protest they sat-in at the entrance hall of the main building. They sat for several hours, when the announcement came that the case was going to be reconsidered.
“Our protests had an effect, so we disassembled,” said Henry Foner. Schappes’s job was saved.
During the 1930s there were no black teachers at CCNY, and after a campaign by the students’ Frederick Douglass Society and by the communists and progressives on the faculty, the college introduced its first course in Negro history and culture, and it appointed Dr. Max Yergans, a prominent black scholar, to teach it. The first time Dr. Yergans came into the faculty cafeteria, the white cafeteria workers refused to serve him. The Communist Party members and their allies had to mount another protest to get his meals served. None of this “subversive” activity escaped the notice of the conservatives on and off campus.
In defeating the attempt to fire accused Communist and Jew Morris Schappes and in hiring a black professor, Dr. Max Yergans, CCNY incurred the wrath of the Christian conservatives in the New York State legislature. The powerful conservative right had taken a big hit when the Depression made their Big Business Knows Best position much less legitimate. FDR upset the conservatives greatly with his New Deal, and in 1940 the labor movement was giving Big Business real trouble. There were sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, at the GM plant. Truckers struck in the city of Minneapolis. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the leaders of the Communist Party worked together to organize. By the end of the 1940s the Communist Party had achieved major status in American intellectual and cultural life, and the conservatives no longer could stand by and watch the Jews, Communists, and blacks gain ground in their longtime WASP-controlled society.
Philip, Moe, Jack, and Henry Foner in the summer of 1939.
Courtesy of Henry Foner
They wanted life to go back to the way it was before the coming of the Jews and Franklin Roosevelt. Though Russia was still an ally, full-scale anti-Communist repression, through the Rapp-Coudert Committee of the New York State legislature, was being prepared for the purpose of political revenge and cultural rollback.
The final straw came when CCNY announced it intended to hire peace activist Bertrand Russell onto its faculty. Though it was the conservatives who led the America First drive to keep America out of the war against the Nazis, somehow the conservatives were allowed to attack the leftists in the antiwar movement. For them, the thought of allowing Bertrand Russell, the leading figure of the antiwar movement, to teach at CCNY became too much.
HENRY FONER “The story that went around was that the conservatives considered Russell an advocate of free love. But they were also opposed to his social ideas, his progressive outlook on life and on the problems we faced. I would refer to it as the reaction of reaction—reactionary people who can’t contemplate the idea that change can be good for us. They were very uncomfortable with anything that challenged the status quo, particularly with respect to discrimination. My brother Phil was a target because his historical work was centered on labor and black history. Among his pioneering works was his uncovering the work of Frederick Douglass and publishing it.”
The targets were the Jewish teachers who had joined the Communist Party, and Max Yergan, the outspoken black professor who dared reveal that “the emperor had no clothes” by telling his students that slavery and peonage had not been abolished, but rather that racism was as bad as ever.
Yergan made a speech to defend himself before the Rapp-Coudert Committee, but its contents were kept secret. In response, the teachers’ union paid for air time on radio station WMCA so that Yergan could be heard, but the Rapp-Coudert Committee twisted the arm of the head of the radio station to cancel his appearance.
Here is what the committee didn’t want the public to hear: “I was dismissed because I was unwise enough to interest myself in community affairs. I was unwise enough to concern myself with the conditions under which children are being educated. Why are the schools in Harlem zoned so that Negro children are Jim-Crowed? Why must Negro children be schooled in fire traps? Why, in this richest country in the world, must our children be hungry because there is too much to eat? Why is it 90 percent of all schoolchildren have bad teeth?”
In 1940 such rhetoric—by a black man, no less—was considered downright subversive by conservatives, who were proponents of a segregated society and didn’t want to hear criticism of the American way of life.
Within a year of the Rapp-Coudert Committee’s appointment, over eight hundred public school teachers and college faculty members were targeted by the committee. The key informant at City College, William Canning, named more than fifty of his colleagues as members of the Communist Party, which was enough to get them fired. Under the Smith Act, no actual acts of subversion had to be proved. Membership in the Communist Party was deemed subversive by definition.
Canning’s testimony was supported by two other witnesses—Annette Sherman Gottsegen and Oscar Zeichner. As a result of their testimony, more than fifty members of the City College faculty and staff—including Henry Foner’s three brothers—were fired or compelled to resign. The charge against one of his brothers—Phil—was that he devoted “excessive attention to the role of blacks in American history.” Defending the rights of blacks in 1940 was proof enough that you were up to no good. But Jews like Henry Foner felt that discrimination was wrong no matter who the victim, and he and many other liberal Jews sympathized.
HENRY FONER “My contacts with black people were players on the basketball teams that my brother Moe was playing against. Since I couldn’t play, I was his satchel-carrier. I carried his bag when he went to play the away games for Brooklyn. I saw that Boys High had a black player named Wynn. And that was one of the first black people I saw. And I remember Dolly King. Clair Bee used to give me tickets, and I saw Dolly King play for LIU. I didn’t have social contact with blacks.
“Another black who we rooted for was Joe Louis. The night that Louis fought Schmeling, during that period the Young Communist League was having a training school in the co-ops in the Bronx. At every YCL training school, you wrote songs. Songs were a very important part of our lives. So we had a song, which I’ve sung—David Margolick got me to come to his opening at the Brooklyn Library, and called on me to sing the song—‘Just as Louis knocked the Nazi stuffings out of Max, we’ll exterminate the vermin from the workers’ backs. YCL.’ The Louis-Schmeling fight was really a tremendous event in our lives at that time. The exciting thing about it, it was an event that united the Jews and the blacks, because anything that was counter to Hitler—and Schmeling was considered an ambassador from Hitler—was critical, and I don’t have to tell you how the black people felt about Louis. My memory is reading and learning about celebrations all through Harlem that night. Yes, Louis played a very important role in that, and Lester Rodney and Bill Mardo did interviews with Louis in the Daily Worker, and later on, when I became involved in activities on behalf of Paul Robeson, I had occasion to do some studying and discovered when Louis was being interviewed he said he felt that Paul Robeson, who was a scholar at Rutgers and one of the outstanding performance artists, had done more to break down discrimination against blacks than anybody else.
“I had the thrill of meeting Paul Robeson. The Furriers’ Union had a resort on White Lake. I was the educational director in 1949, the year of the Peekskill riot. Earlier that summer we invited Robeson to come and sing. I had the thrill of writing an introduction for him. I wrote a sketch, and it was sung to the tune of ‘Old Man River’: ‘Here’s Paul Robeson, our own Paul Robeson, he sure knows something, he don’t fear nothin’, he just keeps fighting, he keeps on fightin’ for us. The people love him, the people need him, in every corner his name means freedom, he just keeps fighting, welcome Paul…’
“My brother Phil was very close to Robeson, because while he was teaching at City College, evening session, Robeson’s mother-in-law attended the college and was a student of Phil’s. She was very impressed when she heard Phil speak about Reconstruction, emphasizing its progressive character and giving the lie to those who vilified it as a period of chaos and anarchy as depicted in the film Birth of a Nation. Ms. Goode, Eslanda Robeson’s mother, lived with the Robesons near the college on Hamilton Terrace, and she was so moved that she invited Phil to come over to their home. Phil did not know at the time that Eslanda was a descendant of the first black senator elected during the Reconstruction period. He visited the house, met Robeson, and the two remained close thereafter. When Robeson learned that Phil was preparing a collection of the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass, he expressed an interest in making a commercial recording of them.
“The witch hunt came, and Ossie Davis ended up doing the reading. So there was a close relationship. Robeson was closely involved in the battle against the Rapp-Coudert Committee, and all the fights for academic freedom. He was closely associated with the teachers’ union. There was a connection right through. Later on Phil edited a book, Robeson Speaks, which has all of his writings. It’s the most complete collection of Robeson’s writings.”
While most of the victims of Rapp-Coudert Committee never taught again, the only one who served jail time was Morris Schappes, who acknowledged membership in the Communist Party, but when pressed to name others, would only name those professors who had died fighting on the loyalist side against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He was charged with perjury and Judge Jonah Goldstein sentenced him to serve fourteen months in The Tombs.
HENRY FONER “Morris’s case generated a good deal of support. There was a newspaper in Harlem at the time, published by Adam Clayton Powell, called the People’s Voice, and I remember it carrying articles on the persecution of Schappes, [comparing it] with the struggle of black people.
“The main informant for the Rapp-Coudert Committee was Bill Canning, a professor at CCNY and a colleague of Jack’s and Phil’s who had been taken into our household when he didn’t have a place to live. One of the things that enraged my father when he learned of Canning’s betrayal of my brothers and me was the fact that when he didn’t have money for eyeglasses, my father drove him to an optometrist on the East Side and paid for his glasses.
“Canning was Catholic, and the person who specialized in reaching out to Catholics who had been part of the left movement was Monsignor Fulton Sheehan. Canning became a disciple of Sheehan and when the Rapp-Coudert Committee came along, it provided him with an opportunity to curry favor with the committee and advance his career. Sheehan influenced other people I knew. Bella Dodd was a very outspoken legislative representative for the teachers’ union, who became a devout Catholic and an informer as well.
“The Catholic Church was an important right-wing influence during this period. In the Spanish Civil War, the Catholic Church was a bitter enemy of the loyalist government and an avid supporter of General Franco. One of our most important efforts during this period was to lift the embargo on arms for the loyalist government, which had been imposed by the United States, Great Britain, and France as part of the so-called nonintervention policy. This was a mockery, because Franco had no trouble getting both arms and soldiers from Hitler and Mussolini.
“One of my early dramatic ideas on how the American Student Union should mobilize came at City College. The idea was to set up a large scale in the lobby, and on one side there was a sign that said EMBARGO and on the other side was another scale. We asked the students to sign postcards to call upon Roosevelt to lift the embargo. They signed them, and we put them in a pile, and as they multiplied—we collected thousands of them—the scale tilted. The pressure to lift the embargo became so great that for a time it was believed that President Roosevelt would bow to it, but it didn’t work. The pressure of the Catholic Church prevented him from doing so. I shall never forget walking in Times Square one evening and reading on the Times Building’s news streamer that the United States had definitely decided to keep the embargo in place. We knew then that the cause of the loyalists and Spanish democracy was doomed.”
It is remarkable that after all four Foner brothers—Phil, Jack, Moe, and Henry—lost their jobs as a result of the Rapp-Coudert Committee’s assault on academic freedom, all of them were able to continue to contribute to the cause of civil and human rights, either on another campus or in the labor movement.
HENRY FONER “It was a terrible thing to lose our jobs, but the victims of Rapp-Coudert were very close-knit, so you didn’t feel alone. When the attack first came, there was a good deal of support from the student body. One of Phil’s students was the famous basketball player and coach, Red Holzman, and he participated in the protests against Phil’s firing. One of Jack’s former students wrote to the committee that he was a police officer who could recognize subversion, and that his classes with Jack had been the highlight of his collegiate career. There were fund-raising events for the Foner Defense Committee, and the comedians Sam Levenson and Irwin Corey performed at these events.
“At all the city colleges—CCNY, Brooklyn College, Hunter, and Queens College—they succeeded in getting rid of the best teachers. Frederick Ewen—who was a later victim of the McCarran Committee—has been acknowledged as one of academia’s greatest scholars and was recently given an honorary degree posthumously by the college. His nephew, Herbert Kurz, a prominent insurance executive, has been influential in establishing the Ewen Foundation for Academic Freedom.”
Even though Henry Foner was just a student at CCNY at the time William Canning turned on the Foners, Canning’s testimony would ultimately cost him a career in teaching. While serving as a high school substitute, Foner had passed the test that would enable him to get a regular teacher’s license, but he was denied a license because of “insufficiently meritorious record.” While he was teaching stenography and typewriting as a substitute at Samuel J. Tilden High School, he was inducted into the army in 1942. The school board held its decision on his fitness in abeyance, waiting to see whether he would survive the war, and when he did, bearing a Legion of Merit, the army’s fourth highest award, he returned to teaching as a substitute at Prospect Heights High School for three years, in 1946, 1947, and 1948. From all accounts, he was a popular teacher, interspersing songs like “You’re Just My Type” throughout his syllabus. When the state commissioner of education turned down his appeal, the board took away his substitute license, and a generation of students was denied the opportunity to learn from a gifted teacher.
Mayor John Lindsay and Henry Foner in October 1969.
Courtesy of Henry Foner
Henry Foner was able to switch smoothly from teaching to union activism through the efforts of his brother Phil, who had undergone the same transformation. After Phil was fired from his teaching job at CCNY, he was hired as educational director of the Fur Floor Workers’ Union, and after becoming acquainted with the union leaders, Phil was asked to write a history of the union. When Henry was denied his teacher’s license in the fall of 1948, Phil got him an audience with union head Sam Burt, and Henry was hired as educational director of the Furriers’ Joint Board, which represented the workers in the fur dressing and dyeing section of the industry.
In addition to his educational duties, Henry also took on the job of welfare director. When a worker was denied his unemployment insurance benefits, for example, a hearing would be held, and Henry would argue the case, almost always successfully. When the union welfare and pension funds became an important part of its life, Henry was appointed the supervisor of those funds as well, and when union president Sam Burt died suddenly in 1961, Henry was named the president of the joint board.
On October 26, 1981, the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York passed a resolution apologizing to the victims of the Rapp-Coudert Committee and pledging never to allow another such violation of academic freedom. The story of how it came about is worth telling.
Henry Foner today. Courtesy of Henry Foner
HENRY FONER “In 1980, a ceremony was held at City College, where a plaque was laid honoring the three teachers and the students who had died fighting on the loyalist side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The event was arranged by Irving Adler, himself a victim of another witch-hunting apparatus—the New York State Feinberg Law—and one of the outstanding mathematicians in the world. My brother Phil was one of the speakers, and in the course of his remarks, he said that if the three teachers listed on the plaque had returned from Spain alive, they would have been fired by the Rapp-Coudert Committee.
“The acting president of the college at the time—Alice Chandler—was intrigued by this comment and she asked around to find out what Phil was talking about. College staff member Steve Lieberstein did the research, and Chandler was so moved that she shepherded a resolution that went through the faculty senate, calling for the administration to apologize for what happened to the victims of the Rapp-Coudert Committee and pledging never to let it happen again. The same resolution was presented to the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) and passed unanimously. Morris Schappes was invited to the session and he spoke about the historic significance of the board’s action.
“What does this tell you? It tells you that when sanity takes over, an attempt is made to remedy the damage that is done. The lucky thing about our family was that even though we were all victims of that period, we all reestablished our lives and led fruitful and significant lives. Phil went on to teach at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Jack joined the faculty at Colby College in Maine. Both retired with high honors. Moe became the executive secretary of Local 1199, the Hospital Workers, during its period of phenomenal growth representing hospital and health-care workers, as well as the founder of the world-renowned cultural program Bread and Roses. As far as we were concerned, there was a happy ending, but not all the victims were so lucky.”