Authors: Dana Goldstein
Communist teachers tended to be highly educated Jews and often, like Adler, graduates of City College, known as Harvard-on-the-Hudson. Unlike Ivy League universities, City College did not discriminate against Jewish applicants, many of whom wished to study math, physics, and the emerging social sciences, such as political science and sociology. What drew these young intellectuals to teaching? When Jewish students graduated from City College, they entered a job market tightly limited by both the Great Depression and anti-Semitism. Irving Adler won high honors in math but quickly learned that few of New York's top insurance or accounting firms hired “out” Jews; even City College's own math department employed no Jewish faculty. Ruth Adler experienced even more virulent employment discrimination, due to both her ethnicity and her gender. Working in public education offered a respite from such blatant prejudice. The couple officially joined both the Communist Party and the
New York City Teachers Union.
The New York union had launched in 1916 with social democratic politics, as Local 5 of the American Federation of Teachers. In 1927 it successfully lobbied the state legislature to increase teachers' wages. It was a major victory. But after the devastating economic crash of 1929, New York began to pursue austerity budget measures. The city hired new teachers, including Irving and Ruth Adler, as full-time “permanent substitutes”âa classification that allowed the district to pay them lower wages and deny them paid sick days. For the older teachers who dominated the Local 5 leadership, substitutes weren't a major issue; instead the union prioritized fighting proposed wage cuts for tenured teachers. Nor did Local 5 take a strong position on the
dismal physical conditions in many overcrowded and unsanitary New York City school buildings, particularly those in poor black neighborhoods, where young Jewish subs were more likely to work. Irving Adler was assigned to Haaren High School in Harlem. He helped recruit sixty teachers there to
join the union, and helped organize one of the city's first free lunch programs for poor children.
In the view of Adler and other younger teachers, the union's leaders had became too “
cautious and conservative,” unwilling to criticize the politicians with whom they had once negotiated to advance teacher pay legislation. An opposition caucus, the Rank and File, formed within the union and in 1935 gained control of the Local 5 executive committee. The union's new leaders were in their twenties and early thirties, and many were involved in antifascist organizing; a few even spent their summer vacations volunteering with the loyalist forces fighting Franco in Spain. Most of these activist teachers, including the Teachers Union's new president, Charles Hendley, and its most prominent black leader, Lucille Spence, were not Communist Party members. The union often advised its members to
vote for candidates affiliated with the American Labor Party, a New York State socialist organization that endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt. But several of the TU's most vocal organizers, including Adler, were card-carrying communists.
Local 5's new leadership relaunched the union's newsletter,
The New York Teacher News
, as a serious journal of education policy. In the magazine's first issue, Hendley articulated “
The Union's Stand” in favor of “intellectual honesty” and against “deadening routine” and “lock-step methods” in the classroom.
Though Dewey's “new education” was ascendant among intellectuals and in private schools, only a few of his progressive ideasâtypically the less radical ones, like arranging elementary school children's desks in groups instead of rowsâhad penetrated urban public education. The vast majority of teachers continued to base their lessons on standardized textbooks selected by administrators, and to teach by reading aloud or lecturing in front of the class. In New York City, 41 percent of classes had over forty students. The new union leaders saw lowering class sizes, especially in low-income schools, as a prerequisite for more progressive, creative styles of teaching.
Local 5 embraced a mission beyond the classroom. Mary McDowell had kept her antiwar politics to herself, until she was provoked by the loyalty oath. But the Teachers Union and Hendley loudly swore to “take a stand against the militarists and the imperialists
who promote war.” They vowed to lobby for health insurance, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and child labor laws. On education policy, the union concerned itself largely with racial equality. With the Great Migration of southern blacks into northern cities, the educational challenges of racial diversity were ever clearer. Should northern schools, which were de facto, not de jure, segregated, be integrated? Given the rapid acceleration of white flightâthe exodus of middle-class Irish, Italian, and Jewish families from neighborhoods like Harlem in Manhattan and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklynâwas integration even a realistic goal across the city, or were there too few white children to spread around? The TU chose to pursue a three-pronged civil rights agenda: first, fighting for a rigorous curriculum at schools that served poor children; second, removing racist textbooks from schools and writing new curricula for black and Puerto Rican history; and third, partnering with community organizations to improve social conditions in poor neighborhoods.
In the 1940s and 1950s, one of the union's protests involved
Yorkville High School on Manhattan's far East Side, where 95 percent of the student body was black or Puerto Rican. Many girls chose the school because it had a well-regarded pre-nursing program, yet when freshmen arrived, they were given a battery of IQ and aptitude tests that resulted in most of the nonwhite girls being directed instead to a three-year “annex” course that had nothing to do with nursing. Annex students took few English classes and no math. They spent the day learning “homemaking” skills, such as simple sewing, and left school with scant qualifications for either employment or further education. Meanwhile, several of the city's most academically rigorous schools, like Stuyvesant High in lower Manhattan and Science High in the Bronx, began using test scores to limit enrollment so that they could continue to serve an exclusively white population in a rapidly diversifying city. (Both of those schools remain today bastions of selectivity where admission is determined solely by standardized test scores and where the student bodies contain few black or Hispanic kids.)
Teachers Union leaders did not oppose vocationalism, since they felt job training was a crucial service for the majority of students
who would never graduate from college. During the Depression, even Du Bois, champion of the “talented tenth,” became an ardent supporter of high-quality vocational programs for black teenagers. But TU teachers like
Irving Adler believed vocational high schools ought to continue offering courses in advanced math and foreign languages, instead of seeing those subjects as perks working-class children didn't need and that the school system couldn't afford. Like the Federation in Chicago, the New York union argued that students and their families should choose what courses to take, instead of being confined to a specific track, either vocational or academic, because of the results of an intelligence test.
Because so many black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities with few literacy skills, the TU believed black neighborhood schools should be guaranteed class sizes under thirty and given more funding for guidance counselors, hot lunches, and health clinics.
In both Bed-Stuy and Harlem, union activists urged local police precincts to establish afterschool programs and sports leagues to prevent juvenile crime, instead of relying on harsh curfews and other punitive measures that treated every young black male as a potential criminal, leaving teenagers fearful and wary of authority.
Union pamphlets suggested that teachers of immigrant children learn basic Spanish and create units on Puerto Rican history. From the 1930s on, the union lobbied the New York City Board of Education to discontinue the use of curriculum materials that contained racial stereotypes. A
1950 union study of city textbooks found that in general, they ignored slave revolts, declared that most slave owners had treated their human chattel kindly, treated emancipation as a privilege for which blacks were unprepared, and depicted Reconstruction not as a time of expanded opportunity for freedmen and-women, but as a period of political chaos that practically justified the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow politics. Geography textbooks portrayed European colonialism as a benevolent force bringing culture to “backward” countries like Nicaragua and Guatemala, whose populations one textbook called “quarrelsome and therefore lacking in progress.”
The commitments of civil rights leaders animated the TU's agenda on race. In 1952 W. E. B. Du Bois accepted the Teachers
Union annual award. But as historian Clarence Taylor demonstrates in his 2011 study of the Teachers Union,
Reds at the Blackboard
, the organization's commendable work on racial justice cannot obscure the deeply problematic nature of its relationship to the Communist Party.
Teachers Union publications were filled with rose-colored depictions of life behind the Iron Curtain.
A 1943 TU pamphlet praised Soviet scouting programs for boys and farming education for girls. Three years later, an entire issue of the
New York Teacher
was devoted to celebrating the USSR. It suggested a civics lesson in which teachers would explain to students the difference between the American concept of “freedom from” government intervention and the Soviet concept of “freedom to,” such as freedom to have a job and freedom to have enough to eat. Yes, the Soviet Union was a one-party state, the newspaper acknowledged, but that one party was the representative of the working class. Some prominent TU activists paid little heed to the gathering evidence of Soviet authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
Were communist teachers disloyal spies or patriotic American dissidents? From 1932 to 1945, during the TU's strongest years,
Earl Browder led the American communist movement. Though he participated in Soviet espionage, Browder was a relative moderate. He had come to radical politics through his midwestern involvement in labor unionism and pacifism, and he believed communism could fit within the larger American democratic tradition. During World War II Browder sought to cool hostilities between communists and socialists. He advocated for progressives to present a unified front against fascism, and by the late 1930s he led American communists to support President Roosevelt's New Deal.
Browder's vision of the Communist Party as a cooperative partner within the broader American Left attracted many activist public school teachers. Though radical, the Teachers Union had
six thousand members by 1940, making it by far the largest teachers organization in New York City. Some communist teachers worked diligently on FDR's reelection campaigns; they saw themselves as
pragmatic idealists. Unionists, however, were a comparatively small segment of the teacher corps. During the interwar years, most public school teachers felt unionism carried a blue-collar stain, and they worried that joining with organized labor would decrease the public's respect for teaching as a profession. In December 1940, the American Federation of Teachers expelled the New York and Philadelphia locals, afraid their communist politics would taint the entire teacher unionism movement. In its place the AFT recognized the smaller New York Teachers Guild, a precursor to the United Federation of Teachers, the union that today represents New York City teachers. Yet even after its expulsion, the Teachers Union retained most of its former members. It affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), an umbrella group of unions sympathetic to communism.
Within a few years, the more moderate communism typified by Browder and many TU members began to lose international support. In 1946, Communist Party radicals expelled Browder. His inner circle, including Bella Dodd, the TU's legislative director, were suddenly on the outs with their fellow travelers, and what had been an intimate social group of activist teachers was riven by infighting. Irving and Ruth Adler ran into Dodd at a protest and were dismayed to see many old friends and colleagues refusing to acknowledge her. Isolated and depressed, Dodd, a charismatic speaker well known in New York political circles, reconnected with her Catholic roots and began a new career as a defector media darling, speaking and writing about the evils of godless communism, andâlike the American Legionâdepicting public school teachers as brainwashers of America's youth. The “
function of a Communist teacher is to create people willing to accept Communist government,” she said. Teachers who did not toe the line in their classroom lectures were purged from the party, she claimed.
These dramatic events coincided with the dawn of the Cold War. The United States and Soviet Russia were no longer allies in the fight against Nazism, and American communists found themselves not only attacking one another, but once again in the crosshairs of jingoistic politicians. In 1949 the New York state legislature passed the Feinberg Law, which allowed school districts to dismiss
teachers who belonged to any “subversive organization,” including the Communist Party. Even the far-left wing of the labor movement rushed to distance itself from the red menace. In March 1950 the CIO expelled the Teachers Union and eleven other communist-sympathetic unions. What followed was a decade of anticommunist purges that ended the careers of
378 New York City public school teachers, most of them tenured and extraordinarily professionally distinguished. (An additional 1,000 teachers were investigated but were allowed to continue working.) A purge began when a teacher, typically a TU member, received a notice requesting that she report to the office of Superintendent William Jansen. Once the teacher arrived, Jansen would ask the notorious question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” A reply of “yes” would lead to immediate dismissal; a refusal to answer could bring on an investigation of a teacher's political activities and personal life, followed by a school board trial, which would be breathlessly covered in the newspapers and on radio and television. At least a handful of teachers saved their own careers by “naming names” of supposedly communist colleagues; many others resigned immediately upon receiving a summons, unwilling to perjure themselves, endure a public trial, or inform on friends.