Pressed about whether being a Communist would close a teacher’s mind to any deviation from the party line, she replied that similar speculations had been raised against devout Roman Catholics.....Well, Vera Shlakman, born in 1909, a year later than that bastard Joe McCarthy, outlasted him by 60 years. Of course I imagine Al Shanker was on the sidelines cheering when she was fired.
I knew and know lots of red diaper babies -- the children of parents who were in the Communist Party USA, which had widespread influence in the 30s, especially in civil rights and the fight for unions. I think they were done in by their rigid adherence to the Stalinist line, even when he made a deal with Hitler in 1939.
I don't think the militant union movements in this country could have been built without the work of the CP. But then came the purge that left the unions in control of the kind of people who have led us to where we are today.
I'm very ambivalent about these kinds of political parties on the left (probably some on the right but I don't follow that end of the spectrum.) When I first got involved around 1970, the leading opposition group in the UFT at the time was a known as a CP outpost of teachers who were part of the old Teachers Union (TU), a bunch of whom had been fired around 1954. I learned from some mentors on the left that once a party line was set by the leadership -- not always obvious -- there was no way to deflect them from that line even if it became obvious that they were going in the wrong direction. But more on this topic, which needs to be explored more in depth, another time. Celebrate the life of Vera Shlakman. 108 is nothing to sneeze at. I only have 35 years to go.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/
Vera Shlakman, Professor Fired During Red Scare, Dies at 108 - The New York Times
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Vera
Shlakman, an influential economics professor who was fired by Queens
College after she refused to tell Senate investigators whether she had
ever been a card-carrying Communist — a punishment that brought an
apology three decades later — died on Nov. 5 at her home in Manhattan.
She was 108.
Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by her friend Ellen J. Holahan.
Dr.
Shlakman was the last survivor among more than a dozen teachers at New
York City’s public colleges who were ousted by the Board of Higher
Education during the early stages of the Red Scare wrought by Senators Pat McCarran and Joseph R. McCarthy.
A
42-year-old assistant professor when she was fired in 1952, Dr.
Shlakman neither taught economics again nor wrote a sequel to her
groundbreaking 1935 book on female factory workers.
Thirty years later, 10 of the fired professors, including Dr. Shlakman, were indemnified with pension settlements after receiving an apology from college officials.
“They
were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of
McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with
academic institutions were quashed,” the trustees of the City University
of New York declared in a resolution adopted unanimously in 1980. The
trustees had succeeded the Board of Higher Education.
No one doubted Dr. Shlakman’s political leanings.
She
had been named for the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich. Emma
Goldman, the anarchist, was a regular guest in her family’s home. Dr.
Shlakman was vice president of the college division of a Teachers Union
local that was rebuked for being dominated by Communists.
But
when she was summoned before a public hearing of the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee, led by Senator McCarran, a Nevada Democrat, Dr.
Shlakman invoked her constitutional guarantees of free speech and
privilege against self-incrimination when asked about her membership in
the Communist Party.
“Do
you believe that a member of the Communist Party can be a college
teacher?” Robert J. Morris, the subcommittee counsel, asked Dr. Shlakman
at the hearing, held on Sept. 24, 1952, at the United States Court
House in Foley Square in Manhattan.
She
replied, “I think that any teacher must be judged on the basis of his
performance in the classrooms; that if a teacher follows professional
standards in the classroom, and is a scholar, he is entitled to teach as
any citizen.”
As
an economist, Dr. Shlakman seemed to suggest that “communism” had
become an overwrought term. She cited one example of what, by her
reckoning, had once been branded radical but became an accepted staple
of American life while leaving democratic institutions intact.
“When
the United States Post Office began to carry packages,” she said, “this
activity was viewed as a challenge to private enterprise’’ and “a kind
of socialistic or communistic activity.”
Pressed
about whether being a Communist would close a teacher’s mind to any
deviation from the party line, she replied that similar speculations had
been raised against devout Roman Catholics.
“We don’t condemn people now — at least I assume we don’t — on the basis of guilt by association,” she said.
As
far as the committee and college administrators were concerned, though,
by refusing to respond to the question about party membership, Dr.
Shlakman became a “Fifth Amendment Communist.”
She
was fired from her professorship 12 days after the hearing under two
New York regulations. One, authorized by the State Legislature in 1949,
barred the school system from employing anyone who belonged to what was
deemed a subversive organization.
The
other, a provision of the city charter enacted to thwart corruption,
provided that a city employee’s refusal to testify about his or her
official conduct, because doing so might be self-incriminating, was
grounds for dismissal.
Both
provisions would be declared unconstitutional in the late 1960s. But
they were enforced in Dr. Shlakman’s case, and as she told her fellow
professors after she testified, her firing had left the academic
community with a choice.
“It
must either grovel and accept the standards of orthodoxy prescribed by
the McCarrans and the McCarthys, and those who have capitulated to
them,” she wrote, “or it must resist.”
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She
recalled that educators had resisted earlier congressional inquiries
into reading requirements for college courses. “Is the dismissal of
teachers,” she asked, “easier to accept than the burning of books?”
But profiles in courage were few and far between during the McCarthy era.
The British economist Mark Blaug,
a former student of Dr. Shlakman’s, wrote in an essay in 2000 that she
had been “scrupulously impartial and leaned over backward not to
indoctrinate her students” — which was why, he added, as a college tutor
he had endorsed a student petition demanding her reinstatement.
Less than 24 hours later, he said, the Queens College president ordered him to resign or be dismissed.
“For
a day or two, I contemplated a magnificent protest,” wrote Professor
Blaug, who died in 2011, “a statement that would ring down the ages as a
clarion bell to individual freedom, that would be read and cited for
years to come by American high school students — and then I quietly sent
in my letter of resignation.”
After leaving Queens, Dr. Shlakman was unemployed for a year.
She
then worked as a secretary and a bookkeeper and taught intermittently.
She was placed on an F.B.I. watch list because she was, as an F.B.I.
file put it, “reportedly” a member of the Communist Party from 1944 to
1946 and had invoked the Fifth Amendment before the subcommittee,
according to Marjorie Heins’s “Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme
Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge” (2013).
In
1960, Dr. Shlakman finally started teaching again at Adelphi
University, a private institution on Long Island, in its School of
Social Work. In 1966 she was hired by the Columbia University School of
Social Work, where she taught full time until she retired as professor
emerita in 1978.
Dr.
Shlakman was born on July 15, 1909, in Montreal, to Louis Shlakman, a
tailor and shirtwaist factory foreman, and the former Lena Hendler, both
Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. (Her sister, Eleanora, was named
for Karl Marx’s youngest daughter; her brother, Victor, for Victor
Hugo.)
Dr.
Shlakman never married and leaves no immediate survivors. In her last
years, when she was homebound and blind, she was looked after by several
friends, including Judith Podore Ward and her husband, Bernard Tuchman,
and Ms. Holahan. They said they never asked, nor did Dr. Shlakman
reveal, whether she had ever been a member of the Communist Party.
Dr.
Shlakman earned a bachelor’s degree in 1930 from McGill University in
Montreal, and went on to receive a master’s in economics there. She
earned her doctorate in economics at Columbia.
Queens
College hired her as an instructor in 1938, shortly after it was
established. She taught courses there in labor, Social Security and the
concentration of wealth.
Dr.
Shlakman’s doctoral dissertation, an analysis of female factory workers
in 19th-century Chicopee, Mass., was the basis for her book, “Economic
History of a Factory Town” (1935).
Joshua
B. Freeman, a distinguished professor of labor history at Queens
College and the City University Graduate Center, said by email that her
book had “extended the boundaries of American working-class history” and
influenced a generation of historians.
Alice
Kessler-Harris, a Columbia history professor emerita, wrote in the
journal International Labor and Working-Class History in 2006, “Shlakman
raised the question of how a transformation in the meaning of work for
female workers could, and perhaps did, alter the workplace environment
and the nature of family life.”
Professor
Kessler-Harris said in an email that at a time when the field was
dominated “by Jeffersonian myths about the harmonious interaction of
labor and capital,” Dr. Shlakman’s study of Chicopee confirmed that
capital and labor were at odds with each other in fundamental ways, and
that labor protests were a check on the excesses of the marketplace.
Dr.
Shlakman’s firing from Queens banished her to academic obscurity.
Professor Kessler-Harris said that her copy of “Economic History,”
borrowed from Columbia’s library in 1951, was not taken out again until
1966. (The book was, however, reissued in 1969.)
After
City University offered its apology in 1980, Dr. Shlakman and another
fired colleague, Oscar Shaftel, appealed to City Comptroller Harrison J.
Goldin to resolve a dispute with the state over pensions or death benefits for former professors who had been dismissed during the Red Scare.
In
April 1982, the city announced a $935,098 settlement with seven living
former professors and the estates of three who had died. Dr. Shlakman
received $114,599 — the equivalent of almost $300,000 in 2017 money.
“Do
you feel you have gained your honor back with this?” Dr. Shaftel was
asked at a ceremony where he was joined by Dr. Shlakman and two other
former colleagues.
“I never lost my honor,” he replied.
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