Opinion: Been There, Still Doing That

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So many conferences, so little time.

But this one, I kinda wish I hadn’t missed.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Red Scare was terrorizing Hollywood and purging some of its brightest talents.

Less well known is that the Red Scare was scaring hundreds of Los Angeles teachers out of their jobs. On Thursday evening, United Teachers Los Angeles organized -- ‘’organized’’ being a suspect word 60 years ago -- a forum to revisit that era, featuring teachers who had been singled out, and a video used by the Teacher Defense Committee.

The next-best thing to being there for me was to take a scroll through some of the scores of old Times stories on the subject. They began in the late 1940s and didn’t end until the 1980s, when several of the fired teachers were reinstated and their names cleared, posthumously in one case: David Arkin, the father of actor Alan Arkin.

The stories recalled a 1952 educators’ loyalty oath enacted by the Legislature and inserted into the state Constitution; any teacher who refused to answer questions from Congress or the Legislature had to be fired. ‘’Standing on Constitutional grounds’’ or ‘’on the 5th Amendment’’ was barred under the new law. The ‘mere refusal to answer questions’’ could get teachers fired. Imagine -- the California Legislature unilaterally suspending part of the Bill of Rights.

Teachers were fired across Southern California. Not until 1959, when a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee called for a ‘’full scale inquiry’’ into communist infiltration in L.A. schools, did The Times editorially acknowledge both a manifest ‘’threat of Communist subversion’’ -- and ‘’the possibility’’ that the congressman’s call ‘’may lead to inferences that all teachers are suspect.’’

Astonishingly, the oath is still on the books, and nowadays it seems to be winnowing out the religious, not the red. This very year, 2008, one Cal State University math teacher, a Quaker, was fired for writing the word ‘’nonviolently’’ into her written oath. She was reinstated. A Quaker lecturer at Cal State Fullerton lost her job over the loyalty oath, but got re-hired after the appearance of news stories -- and a lawsuit that allowed her to append a statement of her personal beliefs to the oath that she then agreed to sign.

The novelist William Faulkner wrote for Hollywood off and on for more than 20 years, including the Red Scare period. He undoubtedly knew what it was doing to Hollywood; he may have read about it in the classrooms, too. Either way, he was right when he observed, ‘’The past isn’t dead -- it isn’t even past.’’