Loyalty Oaths, Red-Baiting, and Academic Freedom

LOYALTY OATHS, RED-BAITING, AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Academic Freedom

During the 1930s financial pressures and political factionalism combined to imperil the principle of academic freedom, by which teachers are free to instruct without the imposition of political or ideological agendas. Conservatives in groups such as the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) repeatedly attacked the schools as bastions of communist propaganda and sought to have school boards restrict the curricula of public schools and require teachers to sign loyalty oaths. After the Democratic landslide in the elections of 1936, conservatives, smarting from wholesale repudiation at the polls, turned their attention to the schools, attempting to turn them into bastions of conservative philosophy. Although historians normally date the onset of "red-baiting," or "witch-hunting" for communists, after World War II, for teachers red-baiting began in the 1930s.

Red-Baiting

Immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, conservatives suspected communists were attempting to take control of the schools so that they could subvert the minds of children. Often such charges were brought by conservatives distraught over the new progressive curriculum and seeking to tar it with the brush of communism. In 1928, for example, the DAR accused the progressive National Education Association (NEA) of being "sympathetic with communist ideals" and denounced it in a pamphlet. The frequency of such charges increased during the Depression, especially after teachers organized to oppose sweeping cutbacks in educational financing and other teachers adopted educational philosophies such as social reconstructionism that were sympathetic to left-wing causes.

Loyalty Oaths

The foremost technique for enforcing political conformity was the loyalty oath. In the 1920s some states required their teachers to swear not to teach ideas or doctrines "subversive" to the status quo. The definition of subversive was highly subjective and varied from state to state, encompassing anything from Marxism to civil rights to sexual liberation. The consequence of failing to swear such an oath, however, was clear to everyone: dismissal, a prospect truly intimidating during the Depression. By 1936 twenty-one states were making teachers take loyalty oaths; fourteen of those states had instituted the requirement since the onset of the Depression. Increasingly states also required children to say the pledge of allegiance before the school day began, a practice that would be declared unconstitutional in the 1940s. In the mid 1930s a last-minute rider attached to a congressional appropriation bill for Washington, D.C., required teachers to sign a statement that they were not teaching communism. Educators protested this "red rider" loyalty oath, pointing out that a true subversive would sign anything to achieve his goal; Congress was asking for a conformist gesture of obedience to authority from law-abiding teachers—one that violated the principle of academic freedom and the constitutional right to free political expression in the nation's capital. Pressure from teachers succeeded in rescinding the rider in 1937.

Firings and Dismissals

Throughout the decade there were other challenges to academic freedom. In 1934 six teachers in Toledo, Ohio, were threatened with dismissal for supposedly using radical textbooks, including one by New Deal official Rexford Tugwell. In North Carolina principal James M. Shields was fired for publishing Just Plain Larnin (1934), a novel critical of the tobacco companies. The New York City Board of Examiners began an intrusive screening process to expose subversive teachers. In 1935 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, dismissed English professor Granville Hicks, a noted critic and a communist sympathizer; City College of New York refused to reappoint writer Morris Schappes to the faculty because he had led unionizing activities on campus. At Rollins College in Florida eight faculty members were dismissed in a dispute between the administration and the faculty over a 30 percent pay cut and innovative curriculum,

Attack

Conservatives rarely discriminated in their attacks on the schools, lumping progressives, liberals, socialists, and communists into one subversive group. For some, red-baiting was a business. The Hearst press specialized in boosting newspaper sales by making sweeping and unsubstantiated charges about subversive plots in the schools. "Red Radicalism," William Randolph Hearst hinted ominously, "has planted a soapbox on every campus in America." Cost-conscious school boards routinely dismissed teacher protests against salary cuts as communist inspired. Two teachers in Westchester County, New York, were fired as agitators after protesting a pay cut. Between 1930 and 1936 twenty-five teachers were dismissed and fifty-nine resigned because of budget cuts and protests at the University of Pittsburgh. In Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, thirteen instructors were dismissed on the excuse of their supposed radicalism. Other redbaiters were anticommunist zealots, none more so than Elizabeth Dilling, whose 1934 book, The Red Network, sketched out a fantastic communist conspiracy supposedly reaching from the common schoolteacher to the president. Similarly, New York State Economic Council president Merwin K. Hart denounced the popular textbooks of historian Harold Rugg, used in forty-two hundred school systems, as "promoting unrest, of fomenting class struggle, of proposing unworkable government planning, of retailing inaccurate views of the Constitution." Charles Walgreen, the drugstore-chain owner, was sufficiently influential to get the Illinois state legislature to investigate communism at the University" of Chicago in 1935. The legislative committee concluded, "Nothing in the teachings or schedule of the school can be held to be subversive of our institutions." National Republic, "A Magazine of Fundamental Americanism," advised teachers in 1937 to "Be Loyal to America or Leave It!" Other groups instrumental in pushing for loyalty oaths and dismissals of radicals were the American Legion, the Anglo-Saxon Federation, the Junior American Vigilante Intelligence Federation, and the American Defense Society. In the 1940s such groups stepped up their attacks on American education, and—via investigative agencies such as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the New York State Rapp-Coudert Committee—they successfully purged the schools of presumed radical influences—and of many good teachers.

Orthodoxy

In the 1930s academic freedom was also assailed by Communists on the Left. For the most part teachers' unions and professional groups cooperated with or tolerated Communist functionaries throughout the decade. Often Communists were among the most dedicated teachers and were on the cutting edge of educational reform. The Communist-influenced Local #5 of the AFT in New York, for example, led the nation in providing quality education to black students. While flexible in its pedagogy, the Communist Party nonetheless required rigid adherence to orthodox Soviet politics and sought control of many teachers' unions. Before 1935 Communists believed that non-Communist leftists were "social fascists," implicitly giving aid and comfort to reactionaries. In 1934, for example, philosophy professor Sidney Hook, an early left-wing anti-Communist, was simultaneously denounced as a "red" by the Hearst New York American and as a "counterrevolutionary reptile" by the Communists. After 1935 Communists abandoned such rhetoric in favor of cooperation with non-Communist leftists, but repeated efforts by Communists to seize control of teachers* unions led many educators to view the Communists with suspicion. Factionalism was so pronounced among the members of the New York Local #5 of the AFT that the non-Communist members of the union left to form the New York Teachers Guild, leaving Local #5 in Communist control. When the Communist Party supported the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, most non-Communist leftists and liberals broke all ties to the Communists. Disputes with Communists throughout the 1930s increased the stress on teachers and their unions. As Local #5 representative Abraham Lefkowitz put it after a Communist takeover bid in 1933, "Between the bankers and the Communists, we're having a hell of a time."

Sources:

Robert W. Iversen, The Communists & The Schools (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959);

Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990);

James M. Wallace, Liberal Journalism and American Education, 1914-1941 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991).