The Teacher Wars (15 page)

During the late nineteenth century, New York City had a teacher evaluation system in which principals rated 99.5 percent of teachers as “good.” When reformer William Maxwell became superintendent in 1898, he was frustrated by the lack of centralized information on teachers' performance. He instituted a new system, which required principals to grade teachers on a finer scale, from A to D. Within a few years, it was generally regarded, in the words of
The New York Times
, as “
a joke”; principals resented the copious paperwork involved, and the vast majority of teachers, including McDowell, received a B+ each year, indicating better-than-average performance. But at Manual High School, Snyder was determined to punish McDowell for her resistance to his patriotism agenda. He decreased her rating to a B, threatening that “
C or D more accurately reflects the present value of your services to the city and State.” The animus between the two intensified just before Christmas break in
1917, when Snyder asked every member of his faculty to sign a so-called “loyalty pledge” then circulating throughout the New York City school system, at the behest of the mayor, the superintendent, and the Board of Education. There were several versions of the pledge, but the text of the one McDowell was asked to sign most likely looked something like this:

Of New York City's twenty thousand teachers, hundreds initially expressed reluctance to recite these words or sign their name to them. But when they realized their jobs were at stake,
all but thirty relented. McDowell was one of the holdouts. For a strict Quaker, this vow was impossible. She was a pacifist who opposed, in principle, all wars, no matter what their cause. After she expressed her views in a letter to Principal Snyder, she was suspended without pay. In May 1918
McDowell went on “trial” at the Upper East Side headquarters of the Department of Education. This was not an actual procedure of the city or state legal systems, but rather an internally conducted employment hearing to determine whether McDowell would lose her tenure protections and her job. The room overflowed with reporters, as well as teacher and Quaker supporters
of McDowell. The “judge,” called a trial examiner, noted that as a thirteen-year veteran of the New York City schools, McDowell had a “flawless” teaching record. There was no evidence she had ever indoctrinated her students into her own pacifist or Quaker beliefs. At issue, then, were her private convictions. New York City schools superintendent William Ettinger pressed McDowell, who was on the witness stand, to state whether she would personally take up arms to resist a military invasion. McDowell said she was sure most Americans, including her own students, would do so, but that she could not; there were “many ways of resisting” hostility other than with violence. Her attorneys noted that Quakers had been instrumental in building New York State's public school system, and an 1830 declaration by the state board of education had affirmed the right of schoolteachers not to be questioned on their religious beliefs.

It was no matter.
A jingoistic climate had invaded the public schools, and teachers with dissident politics were being targeted for dismissal, regardless of their excellence in the classroom—and especially if they taught unpopular subjects that did not fit within the vocational framework, like the classics or foreign languages. McDowell was declared guilty of “conduct unbecoming a teacher” and fired.

For educators during World War I, the combination of dissident politics and opposition to IQ testing, strict vocational tracking, or new forms of teacher evaluation could prove especially professionally risky.
Alexander Fichlander, a respected Brooklyn principal, was a pacifist who refused to sign the loyalty pledge. He also supported the AFT-affiliated New York City Teachers Union, which was founded in 1916 to emulate the success of Margaret Haley's organization in Chicago. Fichlander was well known as a critic of the city's A–D teacher rating system, which he thought imposed a bureaucratic burden on principals without actually improving instruction for students. In 1917 the Board of Education denied him a promotion he had already won from his Brooklyn district supervisor, to be the principal of a larger elementary school. John Greene, a member of the committee who made the decision, said the honor would only give Fichlander “
a sphere for wider influence for his unpatriotic views. Here is a man who debased his citizenship and who refused to sign the declaration of loyalty to the United States.”

There was broad public support for the witch hunts that ensnared Fichlander and McDowell. On November 18, 1917, the editorial board of
The New York Times
declared: “
The Board of Education should root out all the disloyal or doubtful teachers. This little private war of these misguided or out-of-equilibrium persons on the United States must stop. They must be put out of the schools; and if they continue to profess sedition publicly, they must be locked up.”

The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions “disloyal” to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans' organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation's public schools.
The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation's youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American. In a directive to its local affiliates, the group asked its one million members to watch for “
reds and pinks” working in public schools, asserting, “There is little difference between some kinds of so-called Socialism, liberalism, radicalism, and Communism.”

In 1921
the Legion partnered with the National Education Association to counteract the growing influence of Margaret Haley's AFT, which both organizations were eager to paint as unprofessional, thuggish, and radical—a labor union in the mold of Bolshevism, which any decent teacher should shun. With the support of the NEA, the Legion introduced an annual “American Education Week” in November, during which teachers were asked to preach that “Revolutionists, Communists, and extreme pacifists are a menace” to “life, liberty, justice, security, and happiness.” The curriculum suggested the following essay topic: “Patriotism, the Paramount Human Emotion.”

The Legion also cultivated a relationship with newspaper magnate
William Randolph Hearst, an opponent of the income tax and increased funding for teacher salaries and schools (all priorities of the AFT). In 1935 Hearst's papers ran a series of articles written by a Legion commander, attacking public school teachers who explained the Depression as a failure of free markets. Teachers who did not purchase Liberty Bonds, did not display the American flag in their classrooms, or did not salute the flag were depicted in Legion literature as a “fifth column” loyal to the Soviet Union. Principals, school boards, and mayors sympathetic to the Legion—or scared to buck the group—targeted such teachers for investigation and sometimes dismissal. In 1939, the Legion's advocacy helped prompt the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate communist influence within the AFT.

Between 1917 and 1960, several waves of patriotic moral panic convulsed the nation's schools, in what the historian Howard K. Beale termed “
an orgy of investigation” that targeted tens of thousands of teachers. Over the course of four decades, the American public was periodically riveted by the drama of teachers fired or put on trial for their leftist political beliefs—even “taking the Fifth” or “naming names” in front of congressional committees. Joining the American Legion's campaign of fear were conservative advocacy groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Christian Front, an anti-Semitic organization associated with the Catholic radio preacher Father Coughlin. At the local level, activists often targeted individual teachers for dismissal. The education historian and commentator
Diane Ravitch remembers that in Houston in the early 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, her public high school came under the sway of mothers who were members of the Minute Women of the USA, an anticommunist group that also opposed New Deal social programs and the formation of the United Nations. Under pressure, the school's librarian removed books about the Soviet Union from the shelves, and the school board forced Ravitch's favorite teacher,
Nelda Davis, out of her job in retaliation for her liberal internationalist views. Davis had also opposed racial segregation.

Witch-hunted teachers were part of an unusual demographic moment in American public education. Because of Depression-era
unemployment in the private sector, as well as racial, ethnic, and gender quotas in professions such as academia, medicine, and the law, the urban teacher corps of this period became particularly diverse and well educated, even to the point of being overqualified. From the 1930s through the 1950s, big-city school districts employed a growing number of teachers with master's degrees and doctorates.
The male share of the teaching force increased from 17 to 30 percent between 1929 and 1960—higher than it is today.
In New York City during the Depression, there was such an oversupply of college-educated teaching hopefuls that the Board of Education instituted a complex, multi-step process for earning a credential. Candidates took exams on pedagogy and content knowledge; a prospective high school English teacher, for example, would be asked to interpret a classic poem. Candidates had to pass a Standard English speech test (which was often used to discriminate against those who spoke with a working-class black or Jewish inflection), and then teach a sample lesson in a real classroom. Lastly, prospective teachers sat for a nerve-wracking interview with school officials, in which their appearance, dress, and manner were bluntly assessed.

Some of the young, educated teachers who passed these stringent tests had left-wing or radical politics, inculcated on university campuses. This did not change the fact that the vast majority of midcentury public school educators remained apolitical. When Beale, the historian, conducted a national survey of teachers during the 1930s, he found
many were disturbingly ignorant of current affairs. But conservative activists were correct that a small yet politically significant segment of the urban teacher corps actively participated in left-wing movements seen during the interwar and Cold War years as a major threat to a stable American government. In a few shocking cases, communist educators were even involved in international espionage.
Three female New York City teachers participated in an early-1940s plot to free the Stalinist assassins of Leon Trotsky, the Soviet dissident killed in Mexico.

Yet the vast majority of pacifist, socialist, and communist teachers were like Nelda Davis and Mary McDowell: local activists and intellectuals who were loyal to the United States yet critical of its wars and domestic inequalities. Sadly, those teachers who lost their
jobs in witch hunts tended—exactly because of their social justice views—to be some of the most dedicated educators, and the most passionate about reaching disadvantaged students. As Beale noted, it was not the “average” teacher who was hurt by red-baiting, but “
the exceptional teacher” who brought a strong sense of mission into the classroom.

This story played out most dramatically in New York City, where Communist activists gained control of the Teachers Union in 1935. They created a “
social movement unionism” that went far beyond the bread-and-butter organizing Margaret Haley pioneered in Chicago. Though both mainstream and communist teacher unionists opposed IQ tracking and supported higher teacher pay and smaller class sizes, the far-left politics of some of the younger teachers during the interwar period split the still-nascent teacher union movement into two camps. One camp, affiliated with Haley and John Dewey, was the precursor to today's unions. Led by the moderate New York City Teachers Guild, it was social democratic and concerned with legislative maneuvering in support of school funding and teacher autonomy. The second camp, which has no real equivalent today, was affiliated with communism and the global anticolonialist ideology of W. E. B. Du Bois, who turned toward Marxism after World War I. This gadfly band of teachers fought aggressively for academic freedom and for schools to embrace a broad antiracist, antipoverty agenda—a platform that, despite its radicalism in its own time, anticipated many later-twentieth-century goals of education reform.

Irving Adler always said that his wife, Ruth, introduced him to communism. The two first crossed paths in the early 1930s at a meeting of pacifist student activists, flirting as they made posters for a demonstration. Irving, a City College math major, considered himself a socialist. But Ruth, the daughter of Jewish farmers who had emigrated from Minsk to upstate New York, was far more radical. She belonged to a branch of the Young Communist League, and even picketed her own Barnard graduation, in defense of medical students who had been expelled from Columbia because of their
antiwar views. Because she did not participate in the ceremony, she did not find out until the next day that she had won the college's highest prize in mathematics. Later that week Ruth and Irving were married, and both began training to become New York City public school teachers.