Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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Defending Left Pedagogy: U.S. Communist Schools Fight Back Against the SACB . . . and Lose (1953-1957) [1] / Marvin E. Gettleman
Introduction
<1> During the 1940s and 1950s the U.S. Communist Party upgraded and broadened its adult education schools, abandoning or ideologically modifying the militant pedagogical centers that had sprung up during the 1920s and 1930s in many American cities. In New York the transformation was complicated as two Party schools (the Workers School and the School for Democracy) merged with each other to create in 1943 the Thomas Jefferson School of Social Science. The California Labor School in San Francisco was the West Coast counterpart of the Jefferson School. [2] I shall try to argue later in this paper that these two schools were quite different. At least two dozen other similar schools were created through the country, often replacing the local Workers Schools in the vicinity: among them were the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago, the Samuel Adams School in Boston, the Tom Paine School in Philadelphia, and many others. Robin Kelley tells us of what had to be the very different clandestine Communist schools in Jim Crow Alabama. [3] Except for the latter, these were open, adult [4] Communist schools, accepting Communist as well as non-Communist students – except for certain specific courses to be discussed below. Some of these schools at their peak enrolled thousands of students each term. The extent of this Communist pedagogical empire may be news to people, since no adequate scholarly investigation has been made of what between 1923 and 1957 was possibly the largest system of adult education in America [5] – until non-Communist colleges discovered the cash cow of continuing education.
<2> Having written general descriptions of both the Jefferson and California Labor School elsewhere, I shall explore in this paper some of the political and pedagogical battles that ended the Communist educational system during the period we call (using inaccurate but irreplaceable vocabulary) McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin had almost nothing to do with the apparatus created by the federal government that actually demolished the Communist schools. Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had his doubts as to the efficacy of shutting down the offending schools. He feared that such an apparatus might send the Communists underground where they would be more difficult to track, and that FBI informers would have to reveal their identities in legal hearings, and be useless thereafter. Yet after the outbreak of the Korean War, conservative Congressmen – and many liberals – joined forces to draft legislation aimed at delegitimizing the Communist movement in the United States. Some of the targeted left organizations attempted to fight back, including the Jefferson and California Labor Schools. The Communist Party itself barely survived after a long struggle, but the extensive adult educational network it once created could not withstand the determined effort of federal, state and local authorities, backed up by a public that had learned to abhor Communism. After the schools were closed up, sporadic attempts by the Party (Herbert Aptheker's American Institute of Marxist Studies, for example) were made to retain some left pedagogical remnants, but nothing anywhere near the former scale.Registration: The Historical and Legal Context
<3> The 1941 Smith Act anticipated the Internal Security Act of 1950 (64 Stat., 987), known also as the McCarran Act, after the Senator from Nevada. This bill when passed served as the main legislative effort of the domestic Cold War. Harry Truman vetoed the Act, but it was overridden by Congress. Despite the President's opposition to the McCarran Act, he did not hesitate to enforce its provisions once it became law. The Act authorized the creation of a new federal agency, the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), [6] which wielded powerful sanctions. [7] The SACB could require that Communist organizations, including the Communist Party itself, be compelled to register with the Attorney General of the United States as an agent of the world Communist movement. Refusal to do so by an organization within the Communist orbit could result in a fine of $10,000 a day, along with imprisonment and fines for officers of the organization, and other harsh sanctions. Directed against almost all manifestations of Communism in the U.S., this legislation became the main weapon against the Communist schools. But these were incidental targets. Demanding that the Party itself register as an agent of a foreign power had highest priority, with left-led trade unions added in 1954 as targets after the passage of the Communist Control Act. A month after the McCarran Act went into effect, the Justice Department drew up the Petition to force the U.S. Communist Party to register as the agent of a foreign power or movement. [8]
<4> Sixteen years of litigation followed. The SACB's 1950 case against the CP exhibited similarities to the preceding year's opening Smith Act prosecution. [9] The evidence presented by the Justice Department consisted mainly of Marxist classics used in the Smith Act cases, and then recycled for the SACB and later Smith Act cases. When the SACB used the old texts, it was done in a different context than in the Smith Act cases where criminal charges were made against Communist leaders for their alleged participation in conspiracies to “teach, advocate or encourage the overthrow or destruction of … [the U.S.] government by force or violence.” [10] The McCarran Act contained a broader mandate, requiring registration if Communist organizations and individuals concealed their operations, received and followed orders from Moscow, sent cadres abroad for foreign training, and failed to deviate from the policies of the world Communist movement. [11]
<5> Eventually the SACB mission in this particular case collided with the clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stating that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” But in the decade and a half of hearings and court litigation of the Communist Party v. SACB, the U.S. Supreme Court (while generally backing the anti-Communist crusade) drew the line against self-incrimination. If people had to register as agents of a foreign power under the McCarran Act, and, if being such an agent involved punishment, it was hard even for a conservative court to ignore the ensuing direct contradiction of clashing Constitutional principles. Eventually the CP was not obliged to register, [12] but neither did it escape becoming marginalized in the overall political climate of the 1950s, and afterward. The only other long-lasting left organization to avoid submission to the SACB's order to register was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. [13]
The Hearing Battlefield I: The Jefferson School
<6> The hearings that culminated in the SACB's order to the Communist Party (defined by the SACB as a “Communist action” organization) to register also resulted in the Petitions on April 23, 1953, seeking the registration of twelve left wing “Communist front” organizations. (Communist “fronts” were defined in the McCarran Act as groups that were “substantially directed, dominated or controlled” by the Party, “for the purpose of giving support to a Communist-action organization, a Communist foreign government, or the world Communist movement.”). [14] Among the targeted organizations were the Labor Youth League, the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born and the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York City. This paper focuses on the last-named alleged “front,” and the California Labor School, which received a later federal government order to register.
<7> Headed by Howard Selsam, a former Brooklyn College philosophy professor fired in the 1940-41 New York State Rapp-Coudert purge, [15] the Jeff School (as it was familiarly known in New York circles) was the CP's flagship school. With the help of Frederick Vanderbilt Field and other “rich rebels,” the school purchased a nine-story building at 575 6th Avenue at 16th Street which accommodated the thousands of students who took courses each term. [16] But like all the Communist schools, the Jeff School lost students as the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and especially when the McCarran Act went into effect. Paid undercover informants directed by the FBI began to enroll at this time, helping create an atmosphere of fear in these educational institutions. In a futile defense strategy, the Jeff School announced that “a veil of anonymity would surround its students from now on;” their names would no longer be recorded. [17] Some of the informants soon reappeared as government witnesses against the School in SACB hearings.
<8> The attacks began early in April, 1953, when the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee summoned Selsam, demanding lists of faculty and officers at the Jefferson School, [18] and testimony about its finances and licenses. Senator William Jenner, the Committee chairperson, refused to allow the main witnesses to read a prepared statement, after which Selsam invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to questions about the School. [19] Later the same month, Selsam and others were again called to Washington by the SACB to begin the intermittent hearings that would stretch over several months. The Jeff School's lawyer (and trustee), Harry Sacher (who had served as attorney in the first Communist Smith Act trial [20]) requested that the hearings be moved in New York City, The request rejected, the SACB hearings began in Washington on April 22, 1953, when the SACB staff (including some people who had served on the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1940-41) presented the case for the School to register as a Communist front organization.
<9> It was a strong case. The SACB lined up 245 exhibits (most of which had been used earlier in Smith Act prosecutions) and an all-star group of ex-Communists to testify that the Jefferson School was a Communist front. Among these witnesses were Louis Budenz (former managing editor of the Daily Worker who converted to anti-Communism and then spent an estimated 3,000 hours briefing officials and testifying on Communism's evils), Bella V. Dodd (a former official of the left-led Teachers Union, who, like Budenz, reverted to Roman Catholicism and anti-Communism), John Lautner [21] (former head of security for the New York State Communist Party, and secret informer until his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1950), and perhaps most significant, Frank Straus Meyer, who taught at Communist schools and later wrote an important but bizarre book on Party cadres. [22] Along with these professional anticommunists were several attendees of Party schools who were recruited and paid much smaller sums by the FBI.
<10> Meyer was the one who best grasped the circumstances under which in 1943-45 the militant Workers Schools became tra nsformed into the less dogmatic “broad People's Marxian Schools.” [23] He credited the change to Party leader Earl Browder who, when the tide of battle in World War II turned in favor of the British-Soviet-U.S. anti-fascist coalition (whose leaders first met in Tehran in 1943), proposed a permanent post-war alliance to prevent any resurgence of fascism. Browder's “Tehran vision” had its domestic side: under his leadership the Communist Party disbanded and its schools would no longer openly call for socialist revolution in the U.S. Meyer, who was teaching Marxism at the Jeff School in the early 1940s, seems to have supported this vision, but the brief interlude of international and domestic tranquility ended with Browder's ouster and expulsion in 1945-46. [24] Meyer drifted out of the Jeff School, and of the Party. [25] After testifying against the Jeff School, he soon turned up as witness in 1955 in the SACB prosecution of the California Labor School.
<11> The other ex-Communist witnesses used and – as Herbert Packer indicates – abused their first-hand knowledge of the Communist Party to serve the government's and their own anti-left crusade. Except for Hebert Romerstein (who after his SACB testimony worked for various federal agencies and received grants from right-wing foundations for the many anti-Communist pamphlets he wrote), the other former Jeff School students who testified for the SACB were mainly working class folk, enticed to attend by some disagreements they had with the Communists, and the FBI payments of as much as $100 a month. On the witness stand some of them admitted actually liking the courses they took at the Jeff School. None supported the prosecutors' questions about the alleged promotion of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government at the Party schools. Some of the informers were religious African-Americans who, whatever they liked in the classrooms, resented hearing some of the Jeff School teachers advocate atheism. [26]
<12> On of the main points of SACB's case against the Jeff School was the existence of an Institute of Marxist Studies within the Jeff School, directed by another Rapp-Coudert victim, George Squiers. To be admitted to this Institute a student had to be a Communist Party member and be approved by a special committee. Those admitted were trained in a more intense study of Marxism than in the regular curriculum, and many of them became Party functionaries. [27] SACB prosecutors viewed the training given at the Institute of Marxist Studies as satisfying one of the McCarran Act's main criteria of a “Communist Front”: that the school at 575 Sixth Avenue was essentially a subordinate branch of a Party that belonged to a world-wide subversive conspiracy. The existence of another specialized entity within the Jeff School – the School of Jewish Studies directed by another Rapp-Coudert victim, Morris Schappes [28] – did not carry any similar connotations.
<13> Courses on Marxism, international affairs and trade unionism made up about a third of the curriculum in any one year. Frank Meyer's testimony provided an explanation for this proportion, maintaining that the courses in music, literature, dance and art, etc., were just so many “come-ons” to bring students to the Party schools so that they can be led in the “proper” direction – creating a Communist state in the U.S. The defense did not seriously contest this argument, and even supported it by emphasizing the Jeff School's status as a “legitimate Marxist” operation. No explicit mention either by the government or the respondents was made of any long-range plans the Schools had to prepare the non-elite citizenry to eventually become part of the ruling class.
<14> On some other issues too the respondents' arguments did not directly challenge the SACB's case. While the government's position was that Moscow sought armed conquest in its alleged quest for world domination, neither side attempted to address what Stalin and his successors really meant by “socialism in one country.” For the respondents to raise this question might have undermined what was the U.S. Communist Party's standard view of the U.S.S.R. as a socialist utopia which the U.S. ought to emulate. (The U.S. Communist Party had over a decade earlier had expelled a faction that stood for an American rather than a Soviet model of socialism. [29]) Shards of the Browderist notion of a permanent antifascist alignment among the victors in World War II could barely survive the antagonistic Cold War postures, especially after the Chinese Revolution and the Korean War. In varying degrees, the U.S. policy makers and the mainstream media blamed American leftists for aiding the wrong side in these conflicts. Political temperature in Cold War America did not permit anything but an adversarial discourse followed by punishment to take place.
<15> The SACB held inordinate power in the struggle over registration. Jeff School officials who testified had some reasons to believe they could face fines, prison and other punishments under the McCarran Act. Resistance would be arduous. Those who testified on behalf of the Party schools were cautious in what they said, especially when cross-examined by the battery of SACB lawyers who were not even formally neutral. Of course there were no theoretically neutral juries to whom a plausible defense could be made in the SACB cases. And a layer above these processes was U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, an ardent anticommunist, willing to skirt the law to squelch subversives. [30]
<16> The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was not available after the Hollywood Ten tried to use it and failed. The fallback for Jeff School officials who testified at the hearings was the Fifth, when risky questions were directed at them. When their own lawyers held the floor the Communist pedagogues waxed eloquent about the schools, their high standards, and the advanced degrees of the faculty, their skill in explaining Marxist doctrines. [31] Once the hearings began, the Jeff School's attorney, Harry Sacher, resorted to the weak defense of procrastination, objections and other time-consuming measures. In reading microfilms of the SACB hearings, I was unable to find one single moment when Chief Examiner Thomas J. Herbert sustained an objection by the respondents, or missed an opportunity to speed up proceedings when supporters of the Jeff School were giving defensive testimony.
<17> Attempting to follow the labor defense strategies that were used in such earlier Civil Rights cases as the Scottsboro Boys, [32] the Jeff School lawyers and officials struggled in the hearing chambers and courtrooms, but they also fought for popular support wherever it could be found. Attorney Sacher prepared a pamphlet, In Defense of the Right to Learn, drawn from the SACB hearing transcripts and claiming that the McCarran Act could not be applied “to a school which, as the evidence … shows, was frankly, openly and avowedly engaged only in the teaching of the theories of Communism and Marxism-Leninism.” [33] Director Selsam sent (or at least wrote) a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower with an enclosed statement on “The Right to Teach and Learn Marxism in Institutions Like the Jefferson School of Social Science” signed by 134 prominent left-wingers, among them Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. DuBois, Leo Hurwitz, George Sarton, Corliss Lamont, Bertha Reynolds and Paul Sweezy. Selsam also wrote letters to the NY Herald Tribune and the NY Times calling attention to the dire implications of the SACB prosecution: that “dissenting ideas should not be taught by those who believe in them”; that “Marxist ideas may be prohibited if there is a possible suspicion that believers might sometime use [them] in practice”; and that “any Administration has the right to suppress the teaching of any ideas it believes inimical to its interests.” [34] Speaking to the faithful at the annual Jefferson School dinner in March, 1954, Selsam reflected on the hard tasks necessitated by the School's fragile pedagogical mission: we teach, he said, “the superiority of socialism in the stronghold of world imperialism.”
[It is] not easy to teach peace in the shadow of a Wall Street hell-bent on war . . . [W]e are driven to it by the rich, by the imperialist overseers of our country; the monopolistic owners of our vast productive wealth; … to teach a collective way of life by those who live on exploitation; to teach equality of peoples by those who profit from racial and national discrimination. They seek to punish us to for teaching ideas contrary to theirs …. Our strength is precisely in ideas. [Scientific thought] is to the social world what Copernicanism was to the heavenly one, and Darwinism to the world of life. Our science of Marxism is invincible. [35]
<18> Invincibility failed in late November, 1956, when, after the Khrushchev revelations, a bitter battle was raging inside the Communist Party and among the Jeff School staff and student body. The newspapers announced that the SACB ordered the institution to do what it had been fighting against for years – to register officially as a Communist front. The trustees reluctantly closed the school. Its director, Howard Selsam, along with his assistant David Goldway and the former faculty coordinator, Doxey Wilkerson, all quit the Party, punctuating their act with a collective letter in the May 6, 1956, Daily Worker. Wilkerson then, even though no longer a Party member, took on the thankless task of selling 575 Sixth Avenue, now transformed into a building of chic condominiums in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.
The Hearing Battlefield II: The California Labor School
<19> Although the Jeff School was the “flagship” of American Communist schools, the California Labor School seemed to have the political and institutional strength that, when the Cold War arrived, might have defeated the SACB. Begun as the Tom Mooney Labor School in 1942, the school changed its name two years later. Supported by an array of West Coast trade unions, especially Harry Bridges' International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, [36] and at first including AFL unions, CLS taught a whole generation of workers in California and Hawaii the ins and outs of labor unions. During the Second World War the region experienced tremendous industrial growth, attracting diverse groups of workers (black as well as white laborers from the Jim Crow south), generating fears of racial strife in the region. Industrialists like the Levi Strauss family, prominent California politicians, cultural figures and bankers [37] sought solutions, one of which was to turn to the CLS which they well-knew was a Communist school to accomplish what only the Communists could do – create industrial and racial harmony so that war production would not be hindered.<20> In other ways as well CLS bravely (some thought brazenly) put forth its claim to play a important role in California's social life, as well as its education. Visibly the school's Market Street building mounted a large neon sign over its entrance with its name in lights. Perhaps an even more startling was the 1945 friendly request of the U.S. State Department for assistance from CLS to host labor and left-wing organizations coming to the West Coast for the opening of the San Francisco International Security Conference which created the United Nations. Among other indications of willingness to do the State Department's bidding on this matter, the CLS held “A Tribute to the United Nations” on a weekend in late April, 1945, which featured a Saturday program of music and dance from around the world, exhibits of crafts from Europe and Asia. [38] Afterward, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius sent an effusive letter to CLS Director Dave Jenkins expressing “deep appreciation” for their assistance to the State Department.
Such patriotic and public spirited organizations as you so ably represent have done much in making the [UN] conference a success, in helping to create a basis for a better understanding among the citizens of the United Nations. [39]<21> Evoking the school's honorable assistance to the State Department, CLS made a daring application to obtain federal government monies under the newly-passed Serviceman's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. The school sought financial support for war veterans seeking technical skills, cultural training, literacy and the basis for seeking aspiring to education. CLS won temporary approval from state and federal governmental bodies. [40] None of the other Communist labor schools managed to do this, [41] but the period in which such G.I. Bill benefits flowed in the CLS was short – a year and a half. By the mid-1940s as Cold War issues begin to separate what at the beginning were cordial relations between AFL unions on the one side and later CIO and CLS antagonists on the other. In mid-1947 California state authorities, under pressure, withdrew CLS's eligibility for receiving G.I. Bill funds. And the State's own version of HUAC, the Tenney Committee, and the state AFL were carrying out a full-throated political assault on CLS along with raiding of left-led unions.
<22> In this interlude between a post-war Popular Front and the full scale development of a domestic Cold War, one set of cultural episodes gave CLS not only some renown, but also supplied a boost to the school's resources (which depleted as AFL unions peel off). In 1945 Frank Sinatra, at the tail end of what Gerald Meyer calls the singer's left-leaning period, [42] recorded the anti-racist song The House I Live In, written in 1943 by Abel Meeropol and Earl Robinson. The Roosevelt administration's Executive Order strengthening the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) allowed financing of an 11-minute public service pro-tolerance movie with the same name as the song. The film was released by RKO Studios, starring Sinatra. Through the FEPC, some three thousands dollars of the money earned by the popular film version of The House I Live In was funneled to the California Labor School. [43]
<23> Aside from the multiple boons to its reputation and finances from The House I Live In, the assistance rendered during the United Nations conference, and the winning of support for G.I. Bill benefits that no other left schools could boast of, CLS had some other special features that mark its difference from the Jefferson School, and other CP educational institutions. In his testimony before the SACB in Washington and San Francisco, Frank Meyer, now a fundamentalist anticommunist, insisted that all the Communist schools were identical. [44] He was wrong. First of all one of the main differences was that along with the Marxism, and rich pedagogical cocktail of labor courses, CLS almost from its beginning in 1944, according to its first Director Dave Jenkins, was more like a beaux arts school than any of the other Communist schools – and Jenkins made it clear to me that he was proud that his school exhibited all the eroticism that the term carries. [45] Other evidence (which I am not able to cite here) from documents and interviews indicates also that CLS allowed heterodox courses in Freudian psychology. Jefferson School heavies came west several times to lay down Pavlovian orthodoxy, only to have the heterodox classes resume once the New Yorkers went home.) Also, some branches of the School – especially the theater division – actually defied cautious State Communist Party directives that would have soft-pedaled anti-racist themes when political plays were staged in the rural areas of California. [46]<24> The evidence that is relevant to the fight-back in California supports near-identical similarities with the only other U.S. school of the kind, the Jefferson School, to undergo persecution by the SACB (not to speak of harassment from state and Congressional legislative committees). The smaller schools collapsed under the impact of the two SACB cases against the major East and West Coast schools, from internal intra-Communist divisions and by the growing Cold War pressures in the late 1940's and early '50s. [47]
<25> The CLS hearings opened in early December, 1955, before the final order to direct the Jeff School to register as a Communist “front” had been issued. Defended by attorneys from the left-wing Anderson-Gladstein law firm, and presided over by SACB examiner Francis A. Cherry, former Governor of Arkansas (who earlier had studied at the left-wing Commonwealth College in his state), the hearings were underway in San Francisco. [48] The chief attorney for SACB, James T. Devine set out the government's un-nuanced position on Communist schools in the state – noting their “Phoenix-like characteristics” as the early San Francisco Workers School morphed into the Tom Mooney School, and then reappeared as CLS. Whatever the name, these Communist fronts, Devine stated “are well-known.” They establish a “chain of schools throughout California … with fingers probing for weaknesses in the body of our economic system.” [49]<26> As usual the professional anticommunists, Meyer and Lauter were the first witnesses called by the SACB. Since their testimony repeated what they had said earlier in the Jeff School hearings, and the other venues, further discussion here is unnecessary. The part-time informers were somewhat more interesting, especially those whose disgust with the factionalism in Local 6 of the ILWU helped transform them into what left-wingers called stool pigeons. [50] Of most pertinence to the topic of this paper is the opposition kept up by the CLS administration and faculty, writing eloquent leaflets and pamphlets against the SACB, and directed to AFL unionists who at first were urged by their unions to attend the CLS, but later were warned against associating with Reds. Neither the sophisticated defense strategy of the attorney's nor the leaflets, pamphlets and speeches defending the school by Dave Jenkins and his successor Holland Roberts (for whom the heterodox Jenkins had little respect [51]) could not counter the power of a state government (which abandoned its original support for CLS), and federal apparatus (the SACB) crafted to shut down Communist fronts, or left-led organizations. So like the Jeff School, its West Coast variant, the California Labor School, rather than register under the regulations set up by the U.S. Justice Department, its defenders, realizing they could not fight any more, shut its doors for good in June 1957.
Conclusion
<27> After the top U.S. Communist leaders were held guilty in the 1949 Smith Act case (Dennis v. U.S. 341 U.S. 494 [1951]) the Justice Department initiated another such case involving “second string” Communist leaders on the west coast, including the CLS faculty member Oleta O'Connor Yates (Yates v. U.S. 354 U.S. 77 [1957]). When Yates came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957, the defendants won a narrow decision. But the SACB's decision in the same year held that CLS must register: the same decision that caused the Jefferson School in New York to close down the previous year. So, despite the strengths of CLS, it too suffered the same fate as its New York counterpart. The Cold War agency, SACB, persisted in equating a certain kind of education with indoctrination.
<28> However, what if the Communist pedagogues and their lawyers who fought a decade-long battle to retain their schools, were able to convince the forces arrayed against them that education and indoctrination were not identical? And that dissent was legitimate, even superior to following rote messages handed down by conservative Washington pundits? Would their fight-back have been more successful if they could have more effectively invoked the mural-painting classes of Anton Refregier, Leo Christiansen's a capella chorus, the literature and dancing classes Maya Angelou took at CLS, the Writers Workshop magazine, edited by Alex Saxton and others, or Dashiell Hammett's mystery-writing class, or Annette Rubinstein's Shakespeare classes or Eleanor Flexner's pioneering teaching and writing on feminism at the Jeff School, and the multi-cultural musical program that School held in 1951 at New York's Town Hall where the Jewish People's Philharmonic Chorus sang a song cycle on texts by Langston Hughes? [52] And finally, in this conclusion built of counter-factuals, I ask: would a strain of pedagogy that the Communist schools developed that excluded “failure” altogether and linked learning with building a better and more just world have survived? [53] Or was the Cold War's grim legacy too powerful to overcome?
Notes
[1] Prepared for the Cold War Seminar, Tamiment Library, New York University, October 4, 2007. I thank Jocelyn Olcott and the other members of the NYU Cold War Seminar for their comments on an earlier draft. I dedicate this paper to the memory of my dear comrade, Annette Rubinstein (1910-2007). [^]
[2] No narrative of the condensed history in the opening sentences of this paper exists. This author is working slowly on a book about U.S. Communist schools. Until then, those interested can consult my entries for Workers Schools, Thomas Jefferson School, Rapp-Coudert Inquiry, and Pele DeLappe's California Labor School, all in Mary-Jo and Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (2d. ed., New York, 1998), and this author's essays: “'No Varsity Teams”: New York's Jefferson School of Social Science, 1943-1956,” Science & Society, vol. 66 (Fall, 2002) and “The Lost World of U.S. Labor: Education East and West Coast Schools,” in Robert W. Cherney, William Issel and Kieran Walsh, eds., American Labor and the Cold War (New Brunswick, N J, 2004), pp. 205-15. [^]
[3] Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), Chap. 5. [^]
[4] Some of the larger schools had courses for teen agers, and Saturday courses for young children while their parents wrestled with such matters as the labor theory of value in Marxist classes. [^]
[5] Neither of the two major studies of adult education in the U.S. so much as mentions these Communist schools. See Joseph H. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties (Stanford CA, 1989), and Howard W. Stubblefield and Patrick Keane, Adult Education in the American Experience (San Francisco CA, 1994). [^]
[6] The microfilm edition of the Records of the Subversive Activities Control Board, edited by Mark Naison and Maurice Issterman, with an introductory essay (“The SACB” ) by Ellen Schrecker, have been published by the University Publications of America in 1988. [^][7] See the basic secondary literature: William R Tanner and Robert Griffith, “Legislative Politics and 'McCarthyism: The Internal Security Act of 1950,” The Specter: Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism, eds., Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis (New York, 1974), pp. 174-89 and Schrecker, “The SACB” (pagination not available). [^]
[8] Schrecker, “The SACB” (pagination not available). [^]
[9] I omit here two previous Smith Act cases: the 1941 prosecution of the Socialist Workers Party, and that of alleged pro-Nazis in 1942. [^]
[10] The Alien Registration [Smith] Act (September 29, 1940), section 2, Paragraph 3. [^]
[11] Schrecker, “The SACB” (pagination not available). [^][12] Ibid., and the case-book edited by Thomas I Emerson, David Haber and Norman Dorsen, Political and Civil Rights in the United States (Vol. I, Boston, 1967), pp. 147-86. [^]
[13] The narrative of the Brigade's struggle is set forth in Peter N. Carroll's, Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Stanford CA, 1994), chap. 20 and pp. 248-50. [^]
[14] A third category was “Communist-infiltrated” organizations, which applied to left-wing trade unions close to the Communist Party. [^][15] On Rapp-Coudert, see Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York, 1986), Chap. II. [^]
[16] On the financing of the Jeff School, see Gettleman, “No Varsity Teams,” (footnote 1), p. 341. [^]
[17] New York Times, October 3, 1950, p. 15. [^]
[18] Information on personnel (rarely printed in the CP's early schools) were available in the Announcements of Courses issued every term by the Jeff School (now archived in the Tamiment Library, NYU) and the California Labor School (in the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University, and in other California libraries). [^]
[19] New York Times, April 9, 1953, p. 16. [^]
[20] See Cedric Belfrage, The American Inquisition, 1945-1960 (Indianapolis IN, 1973), chap. X, for Sacher's legal career, which included his imprisonment ordered by Judge Harold Medina in the first Smith Act case. [^]
[21] Two of the witnesses, Budenz and Lautner are covered in Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford, CA, 1962). [^][22] Meyer's book, The Molding of Communists (New York, 1961), one of the volumes in the Ford Foundation series “Communism in American Life,” delivered a vision of eschatological anti-communism so extreme that it loses its subject in historical time and space. His oral testimony at the Smith Act trials and SACB hearings, on the other hand, presented a fairly nuanced anti-Communist view. [^]
[23] SACB hearings, reel 29, Meyer testimony (pagination not available). [^]
[24] For brief and thoughtful interpretations of Browderism, see Maurice Isserman, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party During the Second World War (Middletown CT, 1982), pp. 184-243, and Fraser Ottanelli, The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), pp. 207-12. [^]
[25] SACB hearings, reel 29, pp. 1180-99, 1216. (Meyer had given the same testimony at the Smith Act trial in 1949; see Box 14, folder 29 in Theodore Draper Research Files, Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta GA.) [^]
[26] SACB hearings, reels 29, 30 (pagination not available). For Selsam's nuanced position on religion, see Gettleman, “No Varsity Teams” pp. 346-8. [^]
[27] Description of the Institute of Marxist Studies was printed in the Jeff School's course catalogs. Marv Gettleman's interview with George Squiers (Ocean Bay Park, New York, October 13, 1974) yielded additional understanding of this Institute, as did SACB hearings, reels 29, 30 (pagination not available). [^]
[28] Material on the School of Jewish Studies is rare. The library of the Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace (National Republic collection, Box 108, folder 2) contains the Spring 1949 term list of classes for the School of Jewish Studies. [^]
[29] For this “Lovestonite” heresy of the late 1920s, see Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, 1960), chapters 10-12. [^]
[30] See Brownell's support of FBI break-ins and wiretaps in Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p. 234. [^]
[31] SACB hearing, reel 29, pp. 123-42 (Selsam's testimony). [^][32] See Michael R. Belknap, Cold War Political Justice (Westport CT, 1977), passim; Charles H. Martin's entry for International Labor Defense in the Encyclopedia of the American Left, pp. 368-70, and Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (2d ed., Baton Rouge LA, 1984). [^]
[33] In Defense of the Right to Learn (1957), p. 3, in Jefferson School Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. [^]
[34] Selsam letters in Jefferson School Papers, ibid. [^]
[35] Text of Howard Selsam's talk on March 3, 1954, in Jefferson School Papers, ibid. [^]
[36] According to Dave Jenkins, a close friend of Bridges, the ILWU was CLS's main financial backer, even though Bridges' skepticism about formal learning. He told Jenkins privately that all the education a worker needed “took place on the shop floor or the docks.” Dave Jenkins, interview with Marv Gettleman, San Francisco, June 9, 1990. [^]
[37] The role of wealthy left-wingers both in the creation of the Jeff School in New York, (as mentioned above) and in sustaining CLS in San Francisco, Oakland and various annexes is made clear in Dave Jenkins' oral history, “The Union Movement, the California Labor School and San Francisco Politics, 1926-1988” (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), and Jenkins interview, 1990. Pierre Monteux conductor of the San Francisco orchestra and Mrs. Monteux also endorsed CLS (CLS fall, 1945 announcement of courses, p. 30). [^]
[38] Program brochure and invitation, CLS Papers, San Francisco State University. [^]
[39] Secretary Stettinius to Dave Jenkins, June 23, 1945, ibid. [^]
[40] B.F. Eyeart to Holland Roberts, October 8, 1945, Roberts Papers, ibid. [^]
[41] See Sidney Davidson (Director of the Los Angeles Educational Association) to Holland Roberts, February 27, 1946, CLS Papers, ibid. [^][42] Gerald Meyer, “Frank Sinatra: The Popular Front and an Amerrican Icon,” Science & Society, vol. 66 (Fall, 2002), pp. 311-55. [^]
[43] Malcolm Ross (Chairman, President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice) reporting to CLS before the film was released that the school would get an unspecified share of the proceeds from the RKO/Sinatra film), November 6, 1945, CLS Papers, San Francisco State University. [^]
[44] SACB hearings, reel 29, p. 1425, reel 51, pp. 23-52. [^]
[45] Jenkins interview, June 9, 1990. For substantiation of Jenkins' description of the beaux arts atmoshere at CLS see its Artists Carnival brochures such as the one dated September 21, 1946 and warned anyone attending would be fined 50 cents if not in costume. Arts and Crafts folder, CLS Papers, San Francisco State University. [^]
[46] Some of these themes and episodes are developed in my essay “The Lost World of U.S. Labor Education” cited in note 1). [^][47] For the tensions of the early Cold War years, see Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, Chapters 5-9. [^]
[48] On the Commonwealth College, see Richard J. Altenbaugh, Education for Struggle: American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Philadelphia, 1990), passim. [^]
[49] SACB hearings, reel 51, p. 15. [^]
[50] The testimony of longshoreman William Michael Foard was particularly interesting. SACB hearing, reel 52, pp. 787-1046. [^]
[51] Jenkins interview, 1990. [^]
[52] On classes – especially art classes – at CLS, see Anthony Lee, Painting on the Left (Berkeley, CA, 1999); Mark Dean Johnson, At Work: The Art of California Labor (San Francisco, 2003), pp. 56-61; Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York, 1969), pp. 218-9. For Dashiell Hammett's teaching at the Jeff School, I rely in part on my interview with Annette Rubinstein, New York, March 13, 1989. For Eleanor Flexner's pedagogical contributions at the Jeff School, see her feminist pamphlet (written under the name Irene Epstein, with the collaboration of Doxey Wilkerson) “Questions and Answers on the Women Question” (New York, 1953). See also Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation (Baltimore, 2001). On the musical setting of Hughes' poems, see New York Times, March 12, 1951, p. 23. [^]
[53] On the pedagogy of the Communist schools, see the hand-written autobiographical memoir of CLS Educational Director, Holland Roberts, “The War Years at Stanford and the CLS” (n.d., in Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University). The Jeff School pamphlet How to Study (New York, [1954]), has been attributed to Harry K. Wells. (For an electronic copy of How to Study, e-mail: marvget_at_earthlink.net). [^]
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