Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is made possible by funding from the Ford Foundation. Additional funding is provided through the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
Archival Audio, Freedom to Learn National Education Association:
Board Member: It has been charged, Mrs. Orin, that students in your class are getting un-American ideas and that you are responsible. Do you recognize this as the notebook of one of your students?
Mrs. Orin: Yes, it is Helen’s notebook.
Board Member: Do these notes represent what goes on in your classes?
Mrs. Orin: Helen’s a good student. Yes, this represents what goes on in my classes.
2nd Board Member: So you do teach communism.
1st Board Member: Mrs. Orin, will you explain?
Mrs. Orin: Well, I teach about communism, I’d rather say that we study about it. I feel an obligation to help my students find out everything that affects their lives, and I think you will all agree that communism has affected each and every one of us. If we don’t understand all the facts about communism, how can we know how to fight it?
3rd Board Member: You do teach communism then!
Ms. Orin: Of course I teach about communism. I’m not afraid of the word. And I think you’ll all agree it’s one of the most disturbing influences in the world today.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In April 1940, the New York state legislature established a new committee to investigate the so-called “Red-ucators” that were suspected of infiltrating the state’s public school systems. The Rapp-Coudert committee – modeled after the Dies Committee – quickly set its sights on the City University system, and a wave of subpoenas rocked higher education.
New York was just one of four states that established what were dubbed “little Dies committees,” and 21 states passed laws requiring educators to take loyalty oaths designed to rid the system of communists. In the oath, educators had to swear that they held no membership in, or allegiance to, organizations that wanted to undermine or overthrow the United States government.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: American Subversives. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. Welcome to the loyalty test of The Professors. Our story begins with a series of closed door hearings, aimed at purging the New York City public university system of Red influence.
Archival Audio, Irving Adler: So they had a lawyer named Moskov who became the inquisitor, and people were called in one by one to be asked, ‘are you now or have you ever been a member?’ and I explained before how they decided what people to call, if you were on two lists of what they called subversive activity, like signing a nominating petition for a communist candidate or an American Labor Party candidate or being a member of the IWO, one of the teachers unions, then you were caught.
And I was called for questioning. And I was questioned by a social superintendent Perch and then later also by Associate Superintendent Earnst. And I told them I’m not going to answer this question because it’s an illegal question. The civil service law in New York State forbids anybody inquiring into the political beliefs of an employee. And therefore I refused to answer.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Gemma R. Birnbaum, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
Gemma Birnbaum: It’s really interesting to think about the paranoia in schools because it comes from a couple of different places. The first is that a lot of these school systems, and especially at the higher education level, they’re unionized.
A lot of what the House Un-American Activities Committee is doing is going after industries with strong labor and strong labor unions. They are much more likely to have suspected or confirmed members of the Communist Party among their ranks. Unions are, by and large, not always, but by and large, leftist. And so there’s this idea that these labor unions are tainted by communist infiltration.
The other part of the paranoia is indoctrination and this idea that professors have this power over students. And so they are indoctrinating students into their Communist Party web because they have access to them and because they have a rapt audience and because there is this power dynamic.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: With World War II in the offing, many Americans were already suspicious of communism. The 1919 Red Scare had been stoked by nationalism and anti-immigrant rhetoric of World War I, along with fears that those who had participated in the Bolshevik Revolution – the first successful Marxist revolution that brought about the end of Tsarist Russia – would bring those attitudes to the United States.
Gemma Birnbaum: The first Red Scare, you could argue, never really ends. It just sort of takes a pause because there are bigger problems. It becomes such a part of the lexicon that communism is bad. And it’s not even that capitalism is good. It’s that democracy is good. A republic is good.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 – which codified an alarming alliance between two totalitarian regimes and their leaders, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin – the American Communist Party and its more than 60,000 members came under growing scrutiny.
Within days of the pact, American Communist Party members shifted their message from one opposing fascism to that of non-intervention in what was then a European conflict; some characterized the fight between Britain and Germany as quote “an imperialist war” that had nothing to do with the American working class. The move did nothing to move suspicions away from American Communist Party members, and instead played directly into fears that they had allegiance to foreign nations like the Soviet Union.
Suspicions around public education in particular prompted several states including New York, California, Oklahoma, and Texas, to form their own committees to investigate public schools. In New York the Rapp-Coudert Committee, a nickname for New York State Legislature’s Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Educational System of the State of New York, was established as part of a joint effort between Republican Assemblyman Herbert A. Rapp, and Republican State Senator Frederic Rene Coudert, Jr.
Gemma Birnbaum: They were tasked with identifying how extensive the communist influence in the public education system of New York State was. So, they were specifically concerned with not just communist people being in education but the actual extent of the influence and the leadership in public education.
So, you’ve got fears in city and community colleges that these students will be convinced that communism is good or that they’re going to be brought into this sort of cult of socialism.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Over the next three years, the Rapp-Coudert Committee would subpoena more than 500 teachers, students, and staff from Brooklyn College, City College of New York, Hunter College, and Queens College – the four schools that made up the public university system in New York City.
Among those called to testify was Morris U. Schappes, a lecturer in the English department at City College.
Gemma Birnbaum: He was born in Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian Empire, and emigrated to the United States. He’s given an Americanized name, Morris U.Schappes. The U stands for nothing. He just has this middle initial.
He goes on to get his BA from City College, gets a master’s from Columbia, and starts teaching at a place called the New York Workers School, which was a Communist Party-established adult education center.
Years later, he starts working at the City College of New York in the English department. He’s awarded all of these teaching awards. The students love him.
And he starts to become much more popular in terms of his writing outside of the university. It’s not uncommon to see his writings in the New York Post, in The Nation magazine, Saturday Review, some of which don’t exist anymore, some of which you can still look these up in the archives because you can just go on The Nation’s website, and you can see writings from Morris Schappes. It wasn’t until 1934 that he officially joins the Communist Party.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In one of just several high profile incidents during his tumultuous tenure at City College, Schappes was one of the hundreds of educators brought before the Rapp-Coudert Committee.
Gemma Birnbaum: He does go and testify before the committee and very confidently states that only three members of City College, three members of the Communist Party work at City College. Two are dead. They died in the Spanish Civil War. So, you know, they’re not a problem. This turns out to be a lie.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Upon further investigation, and with the friendly testimony of history instructor William Martin Canning, it was revealed that as many as 50 City College employees had Communist Party affiliations and memberships. Schappes had been caught in a lie.
Gemma Birnbaum: He is indicted and then convicted of perjury in his testimony, that he lied about these affiliations. And so he ended up serving fourteen months in a state prison, which ended up actually being a sort of formative experience for him. So, he learned Hebrew. He went to Shabbos services. He started to get really into Jewish history.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Schappes and the other terminated professors found ardent support from many student groups, as well as the Teachers Union, which formed The Committee for Defense of Public Education to garner public support. Led by Italian immigrant and former Hunter College teacher activist Bella Dodd, the committee held rallies, public forums and letter writing campaigns. Their goal? Demand that the Rapp-Coudert Hearings be held in accordance with the standards of justice, allowing for fair and equal representation, and cross examination from defense, rights that were not always enforced during the Red Scare.
Gemma Birnbaum: The teachers union as a whole was accused by the Rapp-Coudert Committee of being communist-controlled. And The New York Times interviews them, and as a statement, the entire leadership of the union calls the Rapp-Coudert Committee Hitler’s puppets in this very public way, in this very clear way, and makes this incredibly direct connection between what is happening on that committee and what is happening in a larger scale, and how it’s basically going after people that would be considered undesirable by the Nazis.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Charles J. Hendley, president of the Teachers Union, told the New York Times, quote: “We must face fascism on the home front, and facing of the Coudert committee is only a minor phase of the larger struggle.”
The Teachers Union’s demands would go unanswered, and the Rapp-Coudert Committee was unmoved.
In the years after his imprisonment, Morris Schappes had built up a reputation as one of the preeminent scholars in the fledgling American Jewish history field. He also became part of the leftist magazine Jewish Life.
In April 1953, he was once again summoned before a committee to defend himself against accusations of communist sympathies. Joseph McCarthy, the bombastic Senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence after he publicly proclaimed to have names of Communists working in the State Department, subpoenaed Schappes to appear before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The committee was looking into Schappes, and other writers, after overseas libraries run by the State Department’s International Information Agency were told to purge themselves of subversive works. Librarians were forced to remove books, and in some cases, even burn them.
Schappes would ultimately leave the American Communist Party, and he and the staff at Jewish Life were reportedly anguished over the direction of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. They re-formed as Jewish Currents, and severed all remaining financial and editorial ties with Moscow.
Gemma Birnbaum: And then, by the 1980s, City University apologizes to him for everything that he had gone through, for firing him and all of these other professors for decades earlier. They give him a teaching award. And he’s one of the few people that come out of HUAC and McCarthy era with any kind of absolution.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: City colleges were not the only ones targeted, and the Rapp-Coudert Committee was just one of many such groups doing investigations into the quote, “egg-heads.” Schools like Harvard, Yale, and Sarah Lawrence became embroiled in accusations, and hundreds of professors found themselves under investigation.
Gemma Birnbaum: There were a number of what we can call elite colleges, the Sarah Lawrences, the Harvards, the Yales, who were the target of a lot of these proceedings and even self-policing within the university system, so president’s offices and others who were trying to purge their faculties and their staffs of communists.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Many professors and university administrators were willing to report on their colleagues and name names in an effort to protect their reputations, careers, and institutions of higher learning.
Yale’s president Charles Seymour outright refused employment to communists and was believed to be cooperative with local FBI investigations.
“There will be no witch hunts at Yale,” he boasted, “because there will be no witches.”
In an explosive 1949 story published in the Harvard Crimson titled “FBI’s Activities Spread Fear at Yale,” student reporter William S. Fairfield wrote about the turmoil at the rival university:
“Yale University is caught in a mystifying web of ‘cold war’ security.” he wrote. “So is Harvard. So is MIT. So is the country.”
Gemma Birnbaum: I think one of the things that’s really interesting about this era is some of the best reporting is not done by mainstream outlets, like The New York Times or others. It’s done by the student reporters who are doing incredible work in terms of documenting some of these things. And so, if you look back at The Harvard Crimson you’ll start to see over a span of about twenty years the reaction to House Un-American Activities inquiries into McCarthy-era things. And there’s a real fear.
Archival Audio, Freedom to Learn National Education Association:
Mom: Well! Teaching communism in our schools!
Dad: But Mrs. Orin did give you this material.
Student: Yes, but daddy-
Dad: Then she is teaching communism!
Student: But it isn’t like you make out, we have to know about things!
Dad: We’ll see about that.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The anticommunist investigations into education were quickly embraced by some extremists on the far-right. Allen Zoll, an ardent white supremacist and political activist, formed the National Council for American Education, which sought to quote “eradicate Socialism, Communism, and all forms of Marxism from the schools and colleges of America.”
Gemma Birnbaum: He himself was listed as a subversive who needed to be watched in the 1930s. He started a number of different fascist groups and proto-fascist groups in the United States.
He ran a group that had a publication called American Patriot, which was not what I would consider patriotic at all, but actually was quite pro-Nazi, was very interested in the rise of Hitler’s power in a sort of fascinated way.
They would host speakers as part of his groups who were Nazi sympathizers, like this guy Joe McWilliams, who was probably one of the most vocal and cavorted with all of these really terrible people. And so he gets himself on watch lists for being subversive as part of these anti-fascist proceedings that started to take place before it very quickly shifted to this anti-communist sentiment.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Among Zoll’s allies was the far right Christian Nationalist Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the isolationist America First Party. Smith, once an advocate for the Depression-era “Share our Wealth” movement that called for wealth redistribution, had transformed his political identity into an anti-communist crusader. He was also known as, quote, “the most infamous American fascist” and frequently made antisemitic speeches, called for mass deportations of Black and Jewish Americans, and engaged in Holocaust denial.
In 1952, after a year-long campaign against likely presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower, Zoll and Smith were among the organizers of a small but vocal protest at the Republican National Convention in Chicago; their efforts were stymied by the Anti-Defamation League, but Zoll was undeterred.
Gemma Birnbaum: And so it’s really this cover for his attacking and hunting down people he would consider undesirable. That includes Jewish people, Black people, anybody that might also be proportionally overrepresented in the communist movement, in socialist movements, in labor unions, in activism, anything that threatens a proto-fascist vision of America.
And so some of the most prominent supporters that he has are from the John Birch Society. And so he finds an alliance with the Birchers. The Anti-Defamation League labels him a notorious antisemite.
There’s a line of argumentation that says that you can’t necessarily separate the anti-communist witch hunts from white nationalism. I don’t know if that’s true, but I will say that a lot of white nationalists were very supportive of anti-communist proceedings, the John Birch Society being one of them.
But what we see is the creation of a new lexicon for how to speak poorly about Jews and other marginalized groups. And so it is not the point of anti-communist proceedings to instill hatred against Jewish people, but it is a very convenient place for antisemitic people to find a home and to find new language, to speak about Jewish people. Oh, they’re globalists. They’re unionists. They’re these other people. They’re indoctrinating your children through education.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: While the hunt for subversives predated Senator McCarthy’s rise, and would last long after his death in 1957, his name has become synonymous with the Second Red Scare.
Archival Audio, Senator Joe McCarthy: A spy handling secrets obviously is tremendously dangerous—he can cause the deaths of a tremendous number of people–a man ten times as bad is a communist in government, is a communist who is twisting and warping and controlling the minds of the youth of this nation.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by Rebeca Miller and Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the Department of Defense, the US National Archives, Department of Special Collections and University Archives of Marquette University Libraries, and the NYU Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
