Schooled in Fear by the Blacklist

The word could come from anywhere. A rumor passed along by a friend. An item in a newspaper hinting at a pending sweep. Just a whisper was enough, and they’d be off, bags quickly packed and plans strictly adhered to.

The key, Muriel Goldsmith remembers, was to stay invisible. Out of sight meant out of reach, and out of reach meant, in those troubled postwar years, no subpoena to testify before government committees rooting Communists from positions of power and influence.

“It was a season of fear,” says Goldsmith, 76, who lost her job as a roving substitute in the Los Angeles school district in 1953 after refusing to sign a loyalty oath. “People had plans on who would take care of their children. You can’t believe the fear that we went through, all of us.”

There’s a tendency these days to reduce history to images. And the current visual touchstones of America’s purge of Communists are Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood 10, producers, scriptwriters and directors who went to prison after refusing to answer HUAC’s questions about their political affiliations.

History dies hard. Acclaimed director Elia Kazan (“A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront”), a Communist who later repudiated those beliefs, remains one of that era’s more controversial figures. Kazan went before HUAC in 1952 and, citing patriotic duty, named fellow former Communists who’d been involved with him in the Group Theater in the ‘30s. Kazan is reviled to this day by people who think he ratted out his friends, a charge that resurfaced two weeks ago when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced plans to honor him with a lifetime achievement Oscar. (He continues to be shunned by other film organizations.)

But history also tends to forget. Nowhere among those blacklist-era images do you find Goldsmith, who eventually returned to the classroom as an uncredentialed teacher’s aide. Nor will you find Abe Minkus, a teachers’ union activist similarly driven from the classroom. Or Ruth Bishop, a Los Alamitos kindergarten teacher who was convicted of assault-related charges after chasing a process server from her porch with a broom.

By some estimates, the national outing campaign based on political orientation eventually barred some 10,000 Communists, progressives and pacifists from jobs in classrooms, corporations and government. While some people recovered financially, countless others saw their careers--and marriages--destroyed. A few killed themselves.

Teachers Fired

It was a rancorous and rupturing time. In Los Angeles, the hammer fell particularly hard on teachers, with the board of education questioning more than 300 in 1953 alone. About 100 eventually were fired, and despite a critical staff shortage, the school board rejected job applications from at least 100 more, according to histories of the era. Who knows how many others simply walked away from their careers, or retired early?

Five years earlier, the American Federation of Teachers, as part of a nationwide purge of Communists from union ranks, revoked the charter of Los Angeles Local 430, which refused to repudiate Communist members (and agitated for such innovations as increased instruction in other cultures).

“We wiped out and silenced a whole generation of intellectual leadership in the schools,” says Ellen Verdries, 51, of Claremont, an assistant professor of education at Cal State San Bernardino who describes the effect as the “ideological homogenization of the teaching force.”

Verdries, who completed her doctoral thesis on “McCarthyism in the Public Schools” in 1996, says the exodus of progressive teachers meant public schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere were dominated in the ‘60s and ‘70s by teachers “who tended to reproduce the social order rather than challenge it.

“The effect is not really measurable, but I think we lost the ability to be critical and socially conscious, and to have all sides of an issue presented and have students think these things through.”

Martha Kransdorf, an adjunct professor in the University of Michigan’s education department, says most of the targeted teachers brought the same passion to the classroom that infused their political activities. In a sense, she says, the purge was of educational spark plugs.

“These teachers were gifted,” says Kransdorf, who examines the era in her book “A Matter of Loyalty: The Los Angeles School Board Vs. Frances Eisenberg” (Caddo Press, 1994), about the highly publicized legal battle over the dismissal in 1952 of a Canoga Park High School teacher.

“These were people who were dedicated and committed,” says Kransdorf, “who were working to meet with parents and help kids get lunch and school supplies, and to bring public awareness and public attention to problems.”

David Caute, a British historian whose “The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower” (Simon & Schuster, 1978) is a staple of college courses on the blacklist era, argues that while targeted teachers might have embraced progressive politics, that didn’t mean they embraced progressive teaching methods.

“The charges against the teachers were never, or rarely, about what they taught in the classroom,” Caute said by telephone from his home outside London. “There’s very little evidence that they were teaching different interpretations of school text or encouraging pupils to ask more critical questions.”

Still, Caute said, he believes the purge had a chilling effect on how teachers did their jobs, likely dissuading some from classroom innovations to avoid running afoul of politically sensitive school boards.

“There certainly was a climate of conformism and fear,” he said.

Everyday Fear

What is inarguable is that the campaign disrupted countless lives of people who, less than a decade after Americans of Japanese and German descent were held in detention camps, feared the worst from their government. Although they were never used, the Internal Security Act of 1950 and the McCarran Act established detention camps for suspected subversives in the event of a national emergency.

“We thought that we were going to have fascism, and that they were going to round us up and put us in camps,” says Goldsmith. “Every time I would get called to the office, I would go in thinking they were going to hand me a subpoena.”

There are lingering traces of that fear that still spike to the soul. Goldsmith says she feels it whenever she talks about the past. Verdries says it coursed through her research.

“I had trouble with [people] wanting to be identified [in the dissertation],” says Verdries. “That fear of disclosure. Is this going to affect my children, my grandchildren? There was so much intimidation and just awful stuff that happened to people that it doesn’t go away.”

The fear extended well beyond those actually targeted. Goldsmith’s husband, who died three years ago, dropped his pursuit of physics after earning an undergraduate degree from UCLA in 1947. Goldsmith says he feared that working on government projects--the career path for most physicists in those days--would mean exposing his political beliefs. So instead, Los Angeles gained another optometrist.

Not that doctors were safe. Dr. Joseph Hittelman, who is retired in Playa del Rey, was among a handful barred in 1952 from admitting patients to what was then Cedars of Lebanon Hospital after evading a state legislative committee’s questions about politics.

“The attitude of the physicians who were called before the committee was one of social activism,” says Hittelman, who had practiced in East Los Angeles and began agitating in the ‘30s for expanded medical care in poor neighborhoods. “Most of us worked in clinics. It all goes back to seeing the big gaps in health care delivery. We (tried) to liberalize the medical profession. . . . We got a group together to back Roosevelt, and that was a Red activity.”

The legacy lingers in other ways, as well. Under the California Education Code, a teacher still can be dismissed for being a member of the Communist Party or for advocating communism in the classroom, although officials for the state Department of Education and the California Teachers Assn. said they don’t know the last time the issue arose.

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While no one has tracked all those who left their careers, Goldsmith and Verdries say many teachers went on to successful lives in business, law and, in some cases, education outside the L.A. school district.

But a limited survey conducted in the early ‘60s by a Rutgers University professor indicated that few ousted teachers and college professors ever regained their careers. Some achieved success opening private businesses; some went into sales, factory work or manual labor; a few spent fruitless years trying to return to the classroom.

“Some just collapsed from it,” says Goldsmith. “Others got terrible jobs and never went anywhere, and just eked out a living.”

A Historic Legacy

In the 40 years since the purges, many of those involved have died. Many others moved on without a trace. Their stories aren’t lost, though. A number of former teachers have participated in oral history projects over the years, and the details of their lives are available at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a private, nonprofit archive in South-Central Los Angeles of radical and union history.

One teacher, June Sirell, described herself in the oral histories as “a regular schlepper” for left-wing causes in the ‘30s and ‘40s, but not an activist. She refused on principle to testify before a state committee, and her teaching credentials were revoked. She wound up teaching emotionally disturbed children in private schools where credentials weren’t required.

“I was upholding my right to be whatever I am as long as I did not destroy or disturb or destruct, and to associate with whom I please, and to think and say what I choose,” Sirell said. “I upheld my right to live my life as I see fit.”

But there’s also the story of Abe Minkus, a union activist who after losing his teaching credentials, changed his name and went into the dry-cleaning business. In later years, he was left to wonder about what might have been.

“I felt that I was wasted,” Minkus said, according to one oral history. “I think that I had the ability to make a more significant contribution to American life than I see in helping maintain the laundry and dry-cleaning industry.”

One of the more intriguing stories involves Bishop, the former Los Alamitos kindergarten teacher. Now 94 and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Bishop recorded in a family memoir her experience as one of 110 California teachers subpoenaed in June 1959--the last serious effort by HUAC to investigate the state’s schools.

She said she was dressing for work one morning when a policeman knocked on her door with a subpoena to testify before HUAC about her anti-Korean War stance. She greeted him with a broom and chased him from her stoop. Although contemporary news reports say she never touched him, she was convicted of battery, disorderly conduct and resisting an officer, and was fined $600.

But by then, the tenor of the times already was changing, and HUAC was losing its bite. Within hours of her conviction, the Los Alamitos school board voted to return Bishop to the classroom. The round of hearings to which she was subpoenaed eventually was canceled.

The fear, though, never goes away, Goldsmith repeats as she sits in her dark, high-ceilinged living room in Hancock Park, the sounds of traffic outside muffled by thick stucco. For years, she says, she avoided explaining her political history to her five children. “We felt they shouldn’t know anything. They’d be better off.”

And to this day, she remains protective of the other surviving teachers with whom she keeps in touch. A conversation hovers momentarily over a woman whom Goldsmith says enrolled in law school after being fired and went on to become a state judge, a position she still holds.

The judge’s name?

“I can’t tell you,” Goldsmith says softly.