'·TRE"'tREM¥"8'~~. \OUa·· 'E·I'I~ ~J1« ,kf.~i" EUGENE LYONS For 6 years United Press correspondent in Moscow ••• Former editor of the American Mercury • •• Author of the best-selling books Assignment in Utopia; The Red Decade; Stalin, Czar 0/ All The Russias; The Li/e and Death 0/ Saeco and Vanzetti and other works. "~ .. • cover for 0 . if iq.s'eries by outstanding a' .: .. The Enemy in Our Schools by EUGENE LYONS One of my chores as a journalist in recent years has been to follow and write about the progress of Communist penetration of Ameri- can life. I have watched the amazing prolifera- tion of committees, societies, congresses, mo- bilizations under beguilingly "liberal" names - supposedly independent, ostensibly for good causes, but in fact under strict Com. - munist Party control, each of them carefully baited to trap high-minded, weak-minded, worried and frustrated victims. The spectacle is at once fascinating and ter- rifying. It gives the observer a creepy, helpless feeling. It is a little like watching the labors of termites attacking a strong structure you happen to love, filled with people dear to you. You see the insects boring into the foundations, rotting the mighty beams, slowly weakening the whole fabric. And the worst of it, the thing that gives you that deepening sense of horror, is that the occupants of the building are so smugly ignorant of the danger that threatens them, so deaf to warnings. A fact that has impressed me in watching the I 3 spectacle is the prominence of teachers in this termite offensive against American institutions. There is not a roster of sponsors of Communist enterprises or Party-line organizations without a large quota of educators. There is not a campus in the country without its secret nucleus of Red teachers and students "boring from within," perverting education, undermin- ing faith in American freedom and Christian ·morality. Numerically these termites seem negligible. But there is no excuse for complacency. What they lack in numbers they make up in dis- cipline and energy. A tightly organized minority, industrious and fanatical, un- hampered by any moral scruples, it ·makes the most of the indifference of the majority. Only an alert awareness of the menace can contain and defeat Communist infiltration of our school system. It is in the hope of arousing such an awareness that this pamphlet is r-:rittp~~N\rv.\cJl ~ ~ ~ Con:;:n~;~-;asionof all departments of our national life was probably at its highest point in the first months of 1939, just before the Stalin-Hitler Pact of friendship gave the movement a body blow. Only a few days before the blow descended, the Communists here pub· lished an Open Letter bearing about 400 prominent signatures. In fiery language it de- 4 nied arid denounced "the fantastic falsehood" that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did or could have anything in common. It branded those who dared compare the two countries with searing epithets. Here are some of the signers of that strange document, precisely as published in the Daily Worker, official organ of the Communist Party, on August 14, 1939: "Prof. Newton Arvin ~f ' Smith College, Prof. Robert A, Brady of the University of California, Prof. Dorothy Brewster of Columbia University Prof. Edwin Berry Burgum of New York University, Prof. i'iaakon Chevalier of the University of California, Prof. Stanley D , D odge of the University of Michigan, Prof. Dorothy Douglas of Smith College, Prof. L. C. Dunn of Columbia University, Prof. Henry Pratt Fair· child of New York Univers ity, Frof. Mildred Fairchild of Bryn Mawr , Prof. Robert Gessner of New York University. Dr. Wyllistine Goodsell of Teachers College (retired), Prof. Samue! N. H arper of the University of Chicago, Prof. Norman E. Hines of Colgate Univers ity , Prof. Alexander Kaun of tho University of California, Dr. Max Lerner of Williams College, Prof. Charles E. Lightbody of St. Lawrence College, Frof. Herbert. A. Miller of Bryn Mawr College, Prof. F. O. Matthiessen of Harvard University, Anita Marburg of Sarah Lawrence College, Clifford T. McAvoy of C.C.N ,Y., Prof. V. J. McGill of Hunter College, Prof. Robert McGregor of Reed College, Prof. Allan Porter of Vassar . College, Prof. Paul Radin of the University of California, Prof. Frederick L. Schuman of Williams College, Prof. Bernard J. Stern of Columbia University, Prof. VIda D. Scudder o'f Wellsley College, Prof. Ernest J . Simmons of Harvard University, J. Raymond Walsh, Prof. Robert Morss Lovett of Chicago University, now Governor of the Virgin Islands , F. Tredwell Smith, Charles J. Hendley, President of the New York Teachers Union. "Prof. Walter Rautenstrauch, Dean of the Columbia School of Engineering, Prof. George B. Cressey of Syracuse Uni· versity, Prof. Robert Chambers of New York University, Earl P . Han so n, explorer, Dr. John P. Peters of Yale Medical School, Dr. Thomas Addis of Leland Stanford University, Prof. Dirk J. Struik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Walter N. Pol.kov, Dr. Gerald Wendt, Director of Science and Education at the New York World's Fair." 5 ~What nee~~n~; ~~ ~:t'ese =o~ssors are drawn not from a few New York or California institutions but from every type of college and university in the country. These men and women charged with the task of in· structing the youth of the country publicly attested their ignorance of the fact that totali· tarian systems, whether Black or Brown or Red, are alike in essence. More than that, they readily gave the prestige of their respected names and universities to a document d rawn up by Communist stooges and geared to serve Moscow's propaganda purposes. Most of these educators, being honorablt! people, must have squirmed a week later when the Nazi·Soviet alliance was announced and turned their Open Letter into an obscene joke. They must have felt like fools and dupes. A good many of them, no doubt, had been tri cked into signing; they were victims of a typical Communist hoax trimmed with "liberal" verbiage. Yet the list stands as a shocking exhibit of the subservience of some teachers to Moscow, the gullibility of others, and the extent of Communist success in polluting American edu- cation. No one who peruses it, even eighfyears later, can pretend that the menace to American youth does not exist. The most distressing fact, indeed, is that most of the men and women , III that list are still marching blindly and 6 passionately on the Muscovite "Party line." On April 30, 1947, the Moscow Pravda, mouthpiece of the Kremlin, published a kind of "honor list" of foreign friends of the Soviet cause. Among the nine citations for 'the U.S.A., !:\VO were for educators: Ralph Bartori Perry of Harvard and Dr. Albert Einstein of Princeton. A 'reporter of the New York Wodd- Telegram, some time ago made a compilation of the names which have led all the rest on ,Communist manifestoes, sponsor lists and the like. Among the top five, with literally dozens of participations in Red fronts, to his credit; was an educator: Prof. Rautenstrauch of Cqlumbia. An expose of Red-controlled movements undertaken by the Chicago Journal of Com- merce in the summer of 1946 gave a place of honor to "The Higher Learning," noting the prominence of such educators as Arthur Up- ham Pope, Emanuel Chapman, Jerome Davis, Lyman R. Bradley, Ricr ard P. Cox, Ralph H. Gundlach, Ruth F. Benedict and Henry Wads- worth Longfellow Dana. It could, with perfect justice, have added such familiar fellow-travel- ing names as Prof. Howard Shapley of Har- vard, ,Prof. Harry J. Hoijer of die University of California at Los Angeles, Dr. Max Yergan of C.C,N.Y., Dr. ' Harry J. Ward of Union 7 ' Theological Seminary, Dr. J:Ienry S. Sigerist of ~h~~a~s~l o~~ In tHe nature of ~~ case only teachers of some reputation and standing get into such listings. But they are only the marshals of the Red parades. Behind them are the rank·and- file armies of teachers, in schools of every variety, who take their marching orders from the Kremlin's agents in our midst. These include a substantial segment of the membership of notoriously Communist-con- trolled trade unions like the New York City Teachers' Union and its affiliate of College Teachers - expelled from the American Federation of Labor on charges of Red domina- tion; and the Los Angeles local 430 of the American Federation of Teachers. The fact that the children of two of the largest American cities are taught by men and women belonging to Communist organizations; though onl y a fraction of them are pro-Communist them- selves, is sufficiently alarming. The magnitude of the infiltration of our school system was indicated clearly by a legis- lative investigation in New York City in 1942. The probe, headed by Frederic R. Coudert, Jr. (then a State Senator and now a Congress- man), summed up its findings thus: . "There is no doubt whatever that there are hundreds of Communists and intentional 8 fellow-travelers in the school system. Their machinations and conspirative tactics are well known. "This Committee has exposed 69 individual teachers as Communists by legal evidence. It has in its files information and evidence tend- ing \ to implicate 434 9thers, including 96 teachers who signed Communist Party nomi- nating petitions in the year 1939 alone. "It has interrogated a large number of sus- pected teachers at the private hearings. Seven- teen teachers have been convicted in discip- linary proceedings of perjuriously denying Party membership in their testimony before our Committee. Eighteen others have been suspended, of whom eleven are awaiting trial. Six others were not reappointed and seven others have resigned under charges. One teacher was indicted and convicted of the crime of perjury in the first degree by a court of criminal justice." The report makes a significant comment on these facts. In sixteen months of inquiry, it points out, "not one teacher admitted being in the Party when he testified." The proof of their membership had to be provided from docu- , mentary and other sources, so that to the injury of spreading Communist germs they added the insult of perjury. It is a fact which underlines the essence of the matter, namely that these teachers are in 9 the final analysis members of a conspiracy rather than spokesmen of a philosophy. Such concealment is not a matter of the individual Communist's choice. In every case he acts under orders. He has his "Party name,~ known only to a few of his fellow-conspirators, and he carries out specific Party directives in poisoning the minds of the boys and girls en- trusted by society to his ministrations. Another investigation was conduct~d in the State of California, under the leadership of the intrepid State Senator Jack B. Tenney. It dis- closed a penetration of the classroom only a shade less impressive than in New York. But there is no implication that California and New York are the sole or necessarily the worst infected regions. It means only that these States have cared 'enough for the integrity of their ' educational systems to look into the matter. More or less the same picture, there is every reason to believe, would emerge in dozens of other p~ulation center . , 11 ~--- ~~~ ~ In their own lit9ature the Communists are fairly 'candid on the matter of secrecy and con- spiracy imposed on the teacher comrades and their fellow-travelirtg dupes. The Schools and the People's Front by '''Richard Frank," an article in The Communist for May, 1937, is typical of that literature. Those educators who follow the Party line, 10 it declares, "must mobilize the other teachers in this fight. They must take advantage of their positions, without exposing themselves, to give their students to the best of their ability work- ing class education." Then it goes on to say: "Only when teachers have real1y mastered Marxism-Leninism, will they be able skillfully to inject it into their teaching at the least risk of exposure and at the same time to conduct struggles around the schools in a truly Bol- shevik 'manner." The article, and the books of which it is typical , not only prescribe this sort of fraud as a duty. They explain in detail how the Leninist poison can be "smuggled" into every school course, from literature and history to physics and arithmetic. While pretending to teach the subjects in any curriculum as ex- pected by the taxpayers who employ them, they must in actuality convert every lesson into another instalment of Communist' propaganda. To defend such procedures in the name of "academic freedom" is tp.e sheerest nonsense. School administrations, the public, the p ress, honest teachers have not merely the right but the obligation to ' expose every(Communist in their midst; to label him for what he is; to strip the "liberal" and "progressive" camou- fla ge under which the totalitarian agents seek to hide themselves. . 11 I can attest, after some fifteen years of close- up study of the Communist program, that the most vital object of the termite offensive is the mind of youth_ America's growing . generation has been under incessant attack - directly through an array of Communist-controlled youth organizations and student movements; indirectly through teachers subverted for this task. The youth organizations have from time to time changed their names. The American Stu- dent Union, the Young Communist League, the ,American Youth Congress, the present American Yo.uth for Democracy, the Young Progressive Citizens of America which is mak- ing rapid headway on the campuses - these' are but different labels for the same movement. School heads and community leaders who fail to recognize the Communist reality under the semantic disguises do not deserve to be trusted with the job of guiding education. It means ' that they are too short-sighted, or too naive, or too indifferent to face the ever intensifying menace. Parent-teacher organizations have been among the principal arenas of Communist operation. A few are under effective Red ·domi- nation; many more are content to give Party people and fellow-travelers a large degree of ip.fiuence. Vigilance is of the greatest im- portance in those organizations. 12 To illustrate the extraordinary ease with which Communist propaganda is smuggled into our schools, I do not hesitate to direct at- tention to Cornell University. Perhaps other institutions have been as deeply infiltrated, but few others have been as frivolous in defending the infiltration or as stubborn in persisting in the error after it had been exposed. During the war, when great numbers of young men were sent to Cornell for special courses by the Army and the Navy, the Russian department was honeycombed with notorious pro-Soviet propagaJ;ldists. The New York World-Telegram did a bold and patriotic job in exposing the facts at one stage. But the propagandists continued to do their stuff. And clearly Cornell has learned nothing from that experience. In the summer of 1946 it presented a series of courses on "Con- temporary Russian Civilization," under the direction of the same professor who had drawn fire for his tolerance and defense of Soviet intellectual agents during the war: Ernest J. Simmons. Anyone familiar with the who's who of Communist propaganda can only be horrified in reading the roster of Dr. Simmons' staff. Along with a few neutral lecturers, he brought to Cornell such seasoned "cultural" mouth- pieces of the Red propaganda in America as Corliss Lamont, Harry Dana, Vladimir D. 13 Kazakevich, Harriet Moore, Sir Bernard Pares, Dr. Henry E. Sigerist, Henry H. Ware and Albert Rhys Williams! The picture of the Soviet realities presented by such a crew is guaranteed to be acceptable to Joseph Stalin. Lamont is the number one fellow·traveler. Miss Moore, Kazakevich, Sigerist, Williams - each of those people has been a center of pro·Soviet contagion for at . least a decade. I cite this case because of its brassy bold· ness. When such unvarnished special pleading for the .Red dictatorship can be palmed off as education, surely the time is over· ripe for public exposure and official action. Arguments about academic freedom are merely convenient demago gy when trotted out. in defense of such cfl;,de propaganda under a ~versity im- pnmatur. ~ , t. • ~ \GoA Denied moral guidance in homes where "old- fashioned" parental controls have been weakened or abandoned, our children are at the mercy of the intellectual racketeers and political pitchmen who infest the school systems. The Communists · take advantage of the virtual renunciation of leadership by the home and the school. They give our boys and girls what they crave: a faith to live by, though it be a vicious and sterile faith. In unit caucuses 14 and political meetings, in picketing and sloganelfTing, our youth finds the sense of par· ticipation in life which they miss in the class· rooms. In a historical period when young people yearn for answers to questions, the natural authorities - parents, religious guides, teachers-have been tongue.tied or ineffective. And' thus they have left a clear road for the Communists. The fault is not with the students. It is with their elders, 'who seem to have abdicated their role of moral and intellectual leadership. They can easily defeat the Kremlin's offensive in the schools by a twofold program: The first, negative · but unavoidable, is courageous exposure of every Communist false· front organization, every termite·teacher following the Party line. The second, positive and urgent, is the creation of honest, democratic organizations in every school to promote American ideas and moral ideals; organizations to channel the energies and the idealism of young people who need a faith and a dedication as much as they need food and knowledge. Unless we help nurture their souls as devotedly as we nurture their bodies, we leave them exposed without protection to the virus of Communism. It is not enough to banish Communism from the campus. An appealing and stimulating sub· stitute must be provided. l~~) 15 31st STREET • the enemies of nd world peace. the-know - by DON'T TURN THIS DOWN! The ,most fearless and factual expose of Communism ever published. A brief biographical sketch of aulhor in each pamphlef. Face' these faefs, Mr. America, and act while you are still free. I. Everyday Life under the Soviet System. By Eugene Lyons 2. The Soviet Regim e in Practi ce . By Eugene Lyons 3. Mind and Spirit in the Land of Soviets. By Eugene Lyons 4. The Communist Conspiracy Again st the Negroes. • By George S. Schuyler 5. Communism: Means Slavery . By William H. Chamberlin 6. Stalin's World -Wide Fifth Column . By Wm. H. Chamberlin 7. Soviet Communism: The Re co rd of Aggression. By William H . Chamberfin B. Red Tyranny vs . Stepinac. By Richard Ginder 9. the Re ds in Our Labor Union s. By Richard Ginder 10. The Red Terror and Religioo. By Richard Ginder II. The Soviet Caste System . By Dr. Hermann Borchardt 12. I Was a Teacher in Soviet Russia. By Dr. Hermann Borchardt 13. Communism and Fascism : Two of a Kind. By Dr . Hermann Borchardt 14. Radio in the Red . By Oltyer Carlson 15. Red Star Over Hollywood. By Oliver Carlson 16. Spain and Wishful Thinking. By Alice- Leone Moats 17. The Enemy in Our Schools . By Eugene Lyons lB. Communist Strategy and Tactics. By Lislon M . Oak 19. The Red Drive in the Colonies. By George S. Schuyler 20. "My Conscience is Clear." By Archbishop Aloysius Slepinac 21. How are Things in Tito-Slavia? By Richard Ginder 22. The Jewish Tragedy in Soviet Russia . By Isaac Don Levine 23. Humanity Debased . By Isaac Don Levine 24. How Communism Demoralizes Youth. By Ralph de Toledano 25. Why I Ceased to 8e a Communist. By Freda Ulley 26. Justice by Assassination. 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