Education: Schools v. Reds

It has long been a grave question whether any government, not too strong for the liberties of its people, can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies.

So said Abraham Lincoln in a great emergency in 1864. In the great emergency that faced the U. S. people last week, it was clear that their Government had not yet become too strong for their liberties. But straws showed a rising gale, a growing disposition of men in and out of Government to question whether democracy could afford all its liberties, a disposition to uproot minorities whose views seemed to them subversive. Last week in New York City the uprooting began: school authorities started proceedings to dismiss teachers for being Communists.

By last week six ex-comrades had testified before the Rapp-Coudert legislative committee investigating subversive activities in New York City schools (TIME, March 17 et ante). They had named as Communists 64 teachers and clerks in three municipal colleges—Brooklyn, City and Hunter. The catalogue of Red activities was almost mock-sinister. The comrades were pictured as taking party pseudonyms, reading and writing Marxist literature, meeting secretly in each other’s homes, issuing anonymous and scurrilous throwaways, sneaking stickers on subway windows, holding secret union ‘”fraction” caucuses, pleading with witnesses not to expose them. Although a witness accused them of plotting to propagandize their pupils, no one produced proof that they had actually advocated Communism in their classes.

Patrioteers were outraged nevertheless. Jumping up at a Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting, an ex-Tammany judge named Alfred J. Talley demanded that New York City parents “stamp out this slimy enemy” and oust members of the Board of Higher Education (which runs the public colleges) for “neglect of duty.” The Taxpayers Union’s President Joseph Goldsmith demanded that City College be closed until “every un-American professor and student is removed.”

As Red-denouncing daily grew louder, City College’s Acting President Harry N. Wright called a special assembly of his faculty and students and publicly spanked the college’s Reds. Said he: “Academic freedom does not mean unrestricted license. . . . The Communists make use of any issue upon which they can lay their hands to promote rebellion and dissension.” Three days later Dr. Wright suspended the college’s No. 1 ex-Communist, red-haired English Tutor Morris U. (for nothing) Schappes, who confessed to the Rapp-Coudert Committee that he had been a party member for five years. He ordered Schappes to stand trial on charges that he had lied to the committee (saying there were only four Communists at the college), edited a “coarse, abusive, scurrilous, intemperate, scandalous and vulgar” Communist sheet, advised fellow teachers to Redden their students’ minds.

Two days later the Board of Higher Education met behind closed doors. To many New Yorkers, the board itself, which last year tried to appoint Bertrand Russell as a professor at City College, looked Red. Its chairman is liberal Author-Editor Ordway Tead (Harper). After five hours’ debate, the board emerged with a unanimous and unprecedented resolution: “It is the purpose of the Board of Higher Education not to retain as members of the collegiate staffs members of any Communist. Fascist or Nazi group or society, or to retain any individual who, or member of any group which advocates, advises, teaches or practices subversive doctrines or activities.”

Next day Dr. Harold G. Campbell, superintendent of the city’s elementary and high schools, followed suit, announced that he, too, would fire any Communist teacher. Basis: a new State law, still untested, which bars from public office a member of a group seeking forcible overthrow of the Government.

Meanwhile, at City College Morris Schappes had become almost a campus martyr. Small, red-mustachioed, 33, Schappes had taught literature and composition to some 3,500 undergraduates in his 13 years at the college. Five hundred students turned out to cheer him at a rally, heard him cry: “We are the winter soldiers, and cometh late or cometh early, spring will bring us victory.” Schappes denied the board’s charges, declared it did not dare accuse him of teaching Communism in class. He was busy turning out statements for the press at the College Teachers Union office near Union Square when three detectives marched in and marched him off to police headquarters. There he was fingerprinted, confronted with an indictment for perjury before the Rapp-Coudert Committee. Morris Schappes spent the night in the Tombs.

Released from jail the next morning after he put up $5,000 bail, Schappes was barred by Dr. Wright from speaking to students at the college. The purge gathered speed. An instructor labeled Communist was fired from his job in City College’s night school, another was ousted as head of the college House Plan.

Some liberal groups tried to whistle into the gale. A newly formed Committee for the Defense of Public Education denounced the treatment of Schappes as “a common criminal,” charged: “This action is clearly designed to intimidate every member of the teachers’ unions, every teacher, every trade unionist. . . .” The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom invoked the Constitution, declared that teachers, as citizens, had a legal right to be members of the Communist Party. But there were other liberals who refrained from protest, reflecting that Lincoln’s dilemma was more real today than ever. They found it hard to defend a persecuted minority whose offense was not mere unpopularity, but enmity to the State.