On March 13, 1953, a teacher named Julius Hlavaty appeared before the United States Senate’s Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Hlavaty led the mathematics department at New York City’s prestigious Bronx High School of Science, and was widely considered one of the best math teachers in America. He wore a gray chalk-striped suit, a polka-dot tie, and a textured white handkerchief in his breast pocket. He kept his white hair slicked back, and looked more like a continental industrialist than a high-school instructor.
He was there, ostensibly, to speak about Voice of America, the federally sponsored news service that McCarthy was investigating for supposedly pro-Communist leanings. Hlavaty, a Slovakian-speaking immigrant, had recorded a statement about coming to America that had been broadcast across Central Europe. But McCarthy had an ulterior motive for the hearing.
Hlavaty was a member of the left-wing American Labor Party, and may have been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Almost immediately, McCarthy lit into him. Was he a member of the Communist Party? Not now, Hlavaty said, though he refused to talk about his past. Had he registered as a member of the ALP? Hlavaty confirmed that he had, though he didn’t see why his private political opinions were McCarthy’s business.
Hlavaty had no illusion about what was going on. “It seems to me that my name tomorrow is going to be spread over all the newspapers in the country, and what I said here, which would be the strongest defense that I would have, will not be in there,” he told the committee. “What is happening here today means, if not actually, potentially, the end of a career.”
Three weeks later, Hlavaty was fired by the New York City Board of Education for insubordination. The board had recently ruled that anyone refusing to cooperate with Congress—which meant not only answering interrogators’ questions, but also providing them with the names of other suspected Communists—would be summarily ousted. A week after that, Hlavaty’s wife, Fancille, a teacher in the New York suburbs, was also fired. On her last day, she told her students that she had “nothing to hide” but that “inquisitions into a person’s private beliefs, particularly of their distant past, are a danger.”
Many hundreds of teachers were hounded out of the profession in the late 1940s and early ’50s by school boards, congressional committees, and ad hoc citizens’ groups. Countless more were scared away from teaching “controversial” material.
Schools have always been contested ideological terrain in America, whether over who got to attend them or what would be taught there. Today we can hear echoes of the Red Scare campaign against teachers in the Trump administration’s orders to end diversity programs in education, which some worry could lead to interference in teaching about race and history. Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.
“Propaganda for New Deal doctrines, socialism, and the ‘welfare state’ is being poured into American high school children in massive doses,” the Chicago Tribune claimed in 1951. Conservative critics had long charged that the very idea of free, publicly supported education was socialistic. Now, suddenly, in the form of teachers such as Julius and Fancille Hlavaty, they seemed to have found their proof.
Especially in big cities, teachers were indeed a progressive bunch, better educated and often more worldly than the average American. A few had become Communists in the 1930s and early ’40s; a handful still were. And for a while, they had been able to bring their ideas to their classrooms—not Communism itself, but ideas that Communists shared with the broader left, about civil rights, women’s rights, labor, and foreign affairs. When the culture turned against those ideas, teachers were among the biggest targets.
New York City was the epicenter of the Red Scare in education. From 1940 to 1942, two Republican state legislators, Assemblyman Herbert Rapp and Senator Frederic Coudert Jr., held closed-door hearings that, in their secrecy and low standards of evidence, presaged the McCarthy inquiries: Hostile witnesses were forced to name names, and informers were allowed to speak with anonymity. The Board of Education fired anyone who did not cooperate, as well as anyone identified as a subversive by two or more witnesses.
In 1949, New York State passed the so-called Feinberg Law, which made membership in any group labeled subversive by the U.S. attorney general grounds for a teacher’s dismissal. A year later, the New York City Board of Education began “trials” against teachers suspected of Communist sympathies.
One such teacher, Irving Adler, led a group of union members in a suit against the Board of Education, which reached the United States Supreme Court in 1952. But the Court, in a 6–3 decision, ruled that teaching was a privilege, not a right, and that the public’s interest in keeping Communist influence out of impressionable young minds outweighed Adler’s First Amendment rights.
In their scathing dissent, the Court’s two stalwart civil libertarians, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, wrote that teachers had no recourse under the law to explain why they had belonged to a subversive group, which might not be subversive to begin with. “Any organization committed to a liberal cause, any group organized to revolt against an hysterical trend, any committee launched to sponsor an unpopular program, becomes suspect,” the pair wrote. “In that manner, freedom of expression will be stifled.”
During the decade-long Red Scare, from roughly 1946 to 1957, not a single American teacher was found to have imparted Communist ideas on their students, let alone acted “subversively” against the government. But that did little to allay the truly paranoid, who insisted that Communist influence worked in more subtle and sinister ways. Anti-Communist watchdog groups emerged everywhere: some national in scope, others hyperlocal.
In September 1949, a Belgian-born, Yale-trained sculptor named Suzanne Stevenson founded the Minute Women of the U.S.A., a sort of 1950s precursor to today’s Moms for Liberty. Within three years, the group claimed to have 500,000 members. The Minute Women went after Communism in all its alleged forms, but their focus was education. Stevenson gave the mothers of young children a list of subversive books, then instructed them to hunt through their school libraries and haul any suspicious titles before their local school boards. What the Minute Women considered “Communist” broadened over time. Progressive education was a target. So was civil-rights talk—the Houston chapter protested a speech at the University of Houston by Rufus Clement, the president of Atlanta University, a historically Black institution, claiming that his ideas about racial equality made him politically suspect. They managed to bar a United Nations–sponsored writing contest from Houston’s public high schools, and in 1953 forced out the deputy superintendent, who had promoted the contest as too “controversial.”
Groups such as the Minute Women received significant support from national organizations with anodyne titles such as the National Council for American Education, founded by a far-right activist named Allen Zoll. During the 1930s, Zoll had founded an anti-Semitic, pro-fascist group called American Patriots, which was considered so extreme that the military refused Zoll’s application for civilian intelligence training during World War II. His new group positioned itself as a defender of patriotic education against subversives. He pumped out a steady stream of pamphlets: “How Red Are the Schools?,” “Progressive Education Increases Delinquency,” “They Want Your Child,” “Red-ucators at Harvard.” He created a blacklist of sorts, keeping track of ousted teachers and circulating the names to his subscribers around the country, to prevent educators from relocating to a new state. And he developed a running list of “subversive” books, insisting that school and public libraries get rid of them immediately. Hundreds followed his orders; one library, in Oklahoma, even burned its suspicious texts, out of expediency or stridency or both.
Parents and students were encouraged to act as informants, reporting their slightest suspicion about a teacher or principal. In California, the state education commissioner urged the American Legion to report “to me any evidence concerning subversive activity it may have respecting any person connected with the public schools.” School districts got help from Washington: Through its Responsibilities program, the FBI allowed administrators to request information on suspicious teachers or job applicants. According to the historian Beverly Gage, by 1955 the bureau had fulfilled 900 such requests.
All of this—the vigilantism, the censorship, the loyalty investigations—had an immense effect on teacher morale. Thousands left the profession in the early 1950s; many more surely thought better of joining in the first place. Most of those who remained kept their heads down and shied away from important if “controversial” subjects. A 1953 survey by the National Education Association found an overwhelming reluctance on the part of teachers to discuss civil rights, universal health care, capitalism, and sex. “Far more to be feared than any radicalism in our schools is the tyranny that would force education into a straightjacket of regimented conformity,” said Reverend Walter Tunks, the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Akron, Ohio, at the National Education Association’s 1953 convention in Miami Beach. “That is the real threat to our American way of life.”
Many of the same people who went after elementary and high-school teachers soon opened a second front against professors on college campuses. In 1948 in Washington State, the Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities—a mini-House Un-American Activities Committee—launched investigative hearings into University of Washington professors suspected of subversion. Using tactics borrowed directly from HUAC, the committee interrogated dozens of faculty members and administrators; three professors lost their jobs, and many others had their careers derailed.
By the 1950s, more than a dozen states had barred Communists from teaching at public colleges and universities, as had scores of private colleges. Almost every state instituted some form of loyalty oath. In 1950, under pressure from the California state legislature, the University of California adopted an additional oath, forswearing belief in subversive ideas and membership in any subversive organization; as usual, subversive was largely undefined.
In most cases, universities went along. In 1953, the Association of American Universities, a group representing 37 of the country’s top educational institutions, issued a statement declaring that no Communist should be allowed to teach in a college classroom, and demanding that any academic called to testify before a government committee should speak honestly and fully. Several university presidents, including James Conant of Harvard, issued blanket statements barring Communists from their faculties. “America’s colleges and universities,” the historian Ellen Schrecker wrote, “had given Joe McCarthy and the members of HUAC a say over selecting their faculties.”
It was perhaps inevitable that HUAC would single out Harvard: the best-known and most prestigious university in the country and the alma mater of so many of the liberals and progressives behind the New Deal. (Harvard was hardly a fortress of pro-Communist sentiment, however; in a 1949 poll of faculty taken by The Harvard Crimson, more than two-thirds agreed that “Communists should not be employed as teachers.”) In 1953, HUAC got several Harvard academics—including the literary scholar Granville Hicks and the historian Daniel Boorstin, both of whom had attended Harvard during the ’30s and dabbled in Communism—to name names. They testified to the existence of a Communist cell on Harvard’s campus in the ’30s, involving students and professors; though the cell was long gone, it had included one professor who remained on faculty, a physicist named Wendell Furry. Both HUAC and McCarthy called Furry to testify. At first he declined to speak, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Then, during televised hearings in 1954, he agreed to discuss his own past as a Communist, but he adamantly refused to name names. Congress voted him in contempt. He only barely managed to avoid prison time.
After being attacked by McCarthy in Washington and losing his job at Bronx Science, Julius Hlavaty suffered a further indignity. His sole book, a student primer called Review Digest on Solid Geometry, was added to a list of titles to be removed from government-sponsored overseas libraries. In an acid letter published in The New York Times, Hlavaty wrote that his book “consists exclusively of questions, problems, and solutions in solid geometry, logarithmic and trigonometric tables, and reprints of past examinations in solid geometry. Yet it has been thought important to notify all United States libraries abroad to ban this apparently ‘dangerous’ and ‘controversial’ work.” Other books on the list included the novels of Howard Fast and the poems of Langston Hughes, two authors who had likewise refused to discuss their political beliefs before Congress.
Libraries around the world removed copies of more than 300 titles by dozens of writers. A worldwide survey by the Times found that the policy was inconsistently carried out. Books were burned in Tokyo, but merely set aside in a locked room in Sydney. A book by the Times reporter Walter Duranty that was removed from the more than 40 Amerika Haus libraries across West Germany was left on the shelf in Vienna. An overzealous librarian in Buenos Aires removed not just prohibited titles such as The Maltese Falcon, by the pro-Communist novelist Dashiell Hammett, but Whittaker Chambers’s aggressively anti-Communist Witness as well.
Though much of this happened under Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, even he was taken aback by the federal government’s foray into censorship. In June 1953, he traveled to Hanover, New Hampshire, to deliver the commencement address at Dartmouth College. “Don’t join the book burners,” he told the gathered students and families. “How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it?” He continued: “They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”
It was a lesson that America is, apparently, still struggling to learn.
This article was adapted from the forthcoming Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.
The post When America Persecutes Its Teachers appeared first on The Atlantic.
