Education: Communists in the Schools

In the past ten years, New Yorkers have been hearing a lot from Mrs. Bella Dodd. A former political science teacher at Manhattan’s Hunter College, she was a founder of the Redlined New York Teachers Union, in 1943 openly joined the Communist Party, and worked her way up to its national executive committee. There, she served her cause at the top of her lungs. She picketed, argued, denounced —until in 1949, the party suddenly expelled her for “fascist and anti-working-class activities.”

Last week a remorseful Bella Dodd (“God help me for what I did!”) appeared as a witness before a Senate subcommittee investigating Communism in U.S. schools.

Under questioning from Michigan’s Senator Homer Ferguson, she told how successfully the Reds had managed to infiltrate the nation’s schools. Items: ¶ In 1944, there were about 1,500 card-carrying Communists among the nation’s teachers, and up to 1,000 of them were at work in New York City. ¶ In New York City, there were party cells in Columbia University, New York University and in four municipal colleges (City, Brooklyn, Hunter and Queens). ¶ Other party cells of three or more Communists operated at such topflight schools as Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, Harvard, M.I.T., the Universities of Michigan, California and Minnesota.

The Teachers Union promptly denounced ex-Communist Dodd’s testimony as a rehash of “all the stale old slanders and lies that she herself exposed and refuted in the days when she had a respect for facts.” But the subcommittee issued subpoenas for ten suspected teachers. Only seven could be found at the moment, and each of them appeared carrying a bag full of evasions. One social-studies teacher belligerently challenged Senator Ferguson to make a tour of the schools and see for himself how teachers have been “frightened” by the many investigations into Communism among New York teachers. When the subcommittee counsel asked him, “In your opinion, did the North Koreans attack the South Koreans?” the teacher snapped: “I wasn’t there.”

The rest of the witnesses were just as recalcitrant. Louis Relin, teacher of English at Abraham Lincoln High School, called the subcommittee “improper,” flatly refused to say whether or not he was or ever had been a Communist. Another teacher, Lou Spindell of Straubenmuller Textile High School, summoned Jefferson to his defense. Refusing to say whether he had been a Communist, he declaimed: “What was good enough for T.J. is good enough for me.” “I assume,” said Ferguson, “that by T.J. you mean Thomas Jefferson … It is not a legal reason [for not answering].” Spindell tried another tack: like the other witnesses, he refused to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate him. “Thank God,” he concluded, “for the Fifth Amendment.”

After three days of hearings, Committeeman Ferguson went back to Washington. He will return some time next month, he said; meanwhile, New York City would carry on alone. Last week the city claimed some powerful new support for the job: a state court of appeals decision upholding a city charter provision that any municipal employee who refuses, on the grounds of selfincrimination, to answer questions before an authorized body may be fired. Henceforth, all the board of education has to do to get rid of a suspected Red is to prove that he has used the Fifth Amendment to avoid an answer. First cases for the board to decide: those of the reluctant seven who refused to testify before Senator Ferguson.