I grew up in a time of fear.
World War Two was raging. I recall accompanying my father into the basement where he'd flatten empty food cans with a heavy ball-peen hammer. Toss them into the cardboard box. To recycle. Metal was scarce and had to be reworked into guns and tanks. Today we call it recycling. Don't think the word had been coined yet.
Blackout curtains went on the windows. German U-boats were sinking too many of the Liberty Ships my father was building in the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard on Staten Island, N.Y., our home. Before the coastal lights were doused, the submarine commanders could lie offshore and watch the ships exiting N.Y. Harbor heading south towards the convoy rendezvous point near Philadelphia, for example. At night, when the subs couldn't be seen, the ships could, as silhouettes against the shore-lights, blinking on and off as the ships silently passed. Boom! Down they'd go, before their first voyage got very far underway. Adm. King took awhile to tumble to this trick but finally got the picture and the curtains went up.
We were afraid we would lose the war and be taken over by Japanese under Tojo or the wicked Emperor, Hirohito, or Germans, Hitler's Nazis. It's hard to believe that Hirohito was allowed to thrive after the war after all he did and all that was done in his name to make American's lives miserable. We lost a lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines to Hirohito. Hundreds of thousands. He killed millions of more civilians, worldwide.
After the shooting War was the Cold War. We were afraid that the world would go Communist, and the country, as well.
There was reason for the fear, just as there was reason to fear the West Coast Japanese, or Americans of Japanese ancestry. Yesterday I was in the mall at Tanforan in San Bruno. Previously it had been an airfield, a horse racetrack, and the relocation center for the temporary holding of thousands of AJAs pending transfer on trains to concentration camps in the interior.
We were afraid of the Japanese. We meaning mainstream whites, the people in control of the levers of power of government. Paranoia ran deep. What if one of those strange Japanese got it into his head to be loyal to his ancestral homeland, the Empire of Japan, Hirohito, and spied against us, or worse yet, signaled lurking Japanese submarines that the coast was clear to invade? After all, our fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers was lying on the bottom after the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor during peacetime. Anyone who could do that could do anything, right? Right. Round 'em up and the Constitution be damned.
That's the way it works.
The first casualty in war, they say, is the truth.
The second is the Constitution.
Why?
Because fear, paranoia, the instinct to imagine that if the worst-case scenario could happen, it will, is alive and well within us. It's how we protect ourselves some of the time but ruin ourselves in the long run if we give in to it. This is a hard lesson to learn and harder to teach. Telling someone who is afraid not to be afraid just doesn't work. Panic can be relieved but it takes a great deal of individual effort that is not necessarily available on a broad scale. Good political leadership can help, but when the political leaders are as paranoid as their followers, the people who put them where they have a chance to lead, and they don't, we can go to hell in a handbasket. The leading Japanese Internment case, Korematsu, stands for the proposition that it can happen again. Justice Jackson called it a loaded gun, just waiting to be picked up when circumstances warrant.
Below is an article on teachers in New York, victimized by the Red Scare of the early 'Fifties. Of course many had been card-carrying Reds back in the 'Thirties, when it wasn't political death to join the Communist party. It was one of the few promising something different that might work, while the other two, Democrats and Republicans, were riding the economy down the drain into the toilet. The Reds, meanwhile, promised the moon, to be paid for by the supporters of the other two.
Stalin controlled Russia and the Soviet Union, our former ally during the war who stole our nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project at Alamagordo and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Then the Reds exploded an A-bomb, then an H-bomb, after us, showing they were on our tail.
Then Mao beat our man in China, Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Formosa, renamed Taiwan. Then Mao exploded an A-bomb. Not only did we lose China but the Chinese had the bomb.
Then the Communist North Koreans invaded our ally, South Korea and we went into a shooting war on the mainland of Asia, contrary to all advise and a lot of good sense where we didn't make out too well. Previous wars we won: WWI, WWII, the Civil War, the 1812 War against the British, and the Revolutionary War, also against the British. We could never lose a war, we though; never did, never would.
Then came Korea.
Then along came Vietnam.
Suddenly we were losing, to Communists.
We were unable to get rid of Castro, the Communist in charge of Cuba, 90 miles off-shore of Florida. Khruschev planted nuclear-warhead missiles in Cuba. We nearly went to war over that, under Kennedy, when I was in law school. I thought we'd had it and we almost did. I knew damn well every day of my adult life before the fall of the Soviet Union that death would come by frying in a nuclear blast. Staten Island was ground zero for a nuclear attack on New York because that's where the oil tank farms were located across the Kill Van Kull from New Jersey where the refineries were all located on the East Coast.
It's a wonder that the Supreme Court didn't cave into the anti-Red hysteria, which is the acting out product of the rampant paranoia going around. To this day I won't sign a petition on the street out of concern that it will wind up in some FBI file and I'll be marked for future destruction when push comes to shove. This is a product of Cold War thinking, where everything favored by Mao and Stalin was wrong or bad and everything believed in by us was right and good.
It is very hard to be self-critical of one's own country, and back then I wasn't; I was a believer; still am as to back then. I grew up in that sea and couldn't see the water in which I swam. As a lifeguard in filthy Lower Bay water, Raritan Bay area of the South Shore of StatNisland, I was used to swimming in dirty water anyway; you took the bad with the good. Life isn't perfect and ideal cleanliness is too much to hope for, realistically, isn't it?
"These colors don't run," was the slogan arising out of the ashes of the World Trade Center, which had yet to be built when I was growing up. My dad, a construction worker, a crane operator, operating engineer, formerly of the shipyard, later of construction sites, ran the hoist on the WTC. That's the outside elevator used to haul construction material and men up the building side as it was being made tall.
This made him a hard-hat, after the head-protecting helmet for construction site workers, a relatively new idea back then, just as in baseball the batters didn't yet wear helmets despite 90-MPH fastballs whizzing inches past instant death.
The problem in Constitutional Law is not knowing the law, it's in applying it's protections of the individual when all the rest of the individuals are experiencing the periodic paranoia and hysteria that attend periods of stress. The only cure, I suspect, is clear information and exemplary political leadership, both hard to find during a crisis, such as the World Trade Center, 9-11-01.
Below is an article from today, looking back on almost 60 years ago, when fear ran deep.
How would you like to see our president lead during our next crisis? For there will always be another crisis. That's why we band together in a nation under a government of our own devising, to protect us not only from outside threats but from ourselves when we're panicking and casting about hysterically to stamp out the alleged threat.
Do we want him, or her, to abandon the Constitution?
Or use it as one of our best means of protecting ourselves from ourselves as well as others?
This is the lesson of Constitutional Law and History.
When Suspicion of Teachers Ran Unchecked
When Suspicion of Teachers Ran Unchecked
Fifty-seven years later, Irving Adler still remembers the day he went from teacher to ex-teacher at Straubenmuller Textile High School on West 18th Street.
It was the height of the Red Scare, and the nation was gripped by hysteria over loyalty and subversion. New York City’s temples of learning, bursting with postwar immigrants and the first crop of baby boomers, rang with denunciations by interrogators and spies.
Subpoenaed in 1952 to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigating Communist influence in schools, Mr. Adler, the math department chairman and a member of the executive board of the embattled Teachers Union, refused to answer questions, citing his constitutional right.
The end came quickly, recalled Mr. Adler, 96, who later acknowledged membership in the Communist Party: “I was teaching a class when the principal sent up a letter he had just received from the superintendent announcing my suspension, as of the close of day.”
Mr. Adler, who has written 56 books, was one of 378 New York City teachers ousted by dismissal, resignation or early retirement in the anti-Communist furor of the cold war, when invoking the Fifth Amendment became automatic grounds for termination. These painful stories may have been buried to history, if not for a coming documentary and a lawsuit seeking to reopen 150,000 documents on more than 1,150 teachers who were investigated and on the informers who turned them in. Among the questions, all these years later, is whether their names can be published, and whether there is still a stigma in being named, or having named, a Communist.
The Board of Education’s purges came to be widely condemned as the city’s own witch hunt, repudiated decades later by subsequent administrations that reinstated dozens of dismissed teachers.
“None of those teachers were ever found negligent in the classroom,” said Clarence Taylor, a professor of history at Baruch College who has written a study of the Teachers Union and the ideological strife that destroyed it. “They went after them for affiliation with the Communist Party.”
Teacher interrogations also occurred in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo, among other cities. In hearings of the security subcommittee, about 1,500 of the country’s one million teachers were said to be “card-carrying Communists,” with two-thirds of the accused residing in New York City.
The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Lisa Harbatkin, a freelance writer, applied in 2007 to see the files on her deceased parents, Sidney and Margaret Harbatkin, and other teachers summoned for questioning in the 1950s by the city’s powerful assistant corporation counsel, Saul Moskoff, assigned to the Board of Education as chief prosecutor.
As next of kin, she got access to files showing that informants had named her parents as Communists, and that her father had surrendered his license rather than be interrogated while her mother escaped retribution. But files on other teachers and suspected informants were withheld.
Under privacy rules adopted last year by the Municipal Archives, researchers without permission from the subjects or their heirs can review files only upon agreeing to seek city approval before quoting material or publishing identifying personal information about the subjects (except for accounts from already-public sources like newspapers).
Ms. Harbatkin sued, gaining free representation from the Albany firm of Hiscock & Barclay. “The city’s offer imposes restrictions on her freedom of speech that are unconstitutional,” said her lead lawyer, Michael Grygiel. The legal brief calls it “more than a little ironic” that the city sought “to prohibit Ms. Harbatkin from ‘naming names’ in writing about this period of history.”
A lawyer for the city, Marilyn Richter, said that a 1980 court ruling allowed the archives to redact some names before releasing files. But the same ruling noted that the city had sealed the files only until 2000.
“The courts previously determined that the individuals named in these records have a right of privacy not to have their identity revealed,” said Ms. Richter. She said the offer to allow Ms. Harbatkin to review unredacted copies of the documents, “if she agrees not to reveal identifying information, actually provides her greater access to the records than the law requires.”
Ms. Harbatkin said her aim was to write about cases she found compelling but not to expose every name in the files. “The fear increases directly proportional to how closed off everything is,” she said. The city, she said, had no right “to tell you what you can see.”
Files already released to Ms. Harbatkin recount a battle of wills in 1956 between her mother and Mr. Moskoff, the inquisitor who became the fearsome face of the crusade to ferret out subversion in the schools. In her interrogation, Margaret Harbatkin acknowledged joining a Communist Party cell under a pseudonym but said she later withdrew.
Then, directed by Mr. Moskoff “to identify those people who were members of this group,” she replied: “I don’t remember any. I’ve known teachers at so many different schools. As a substitute I went from — I don’t even remember all the different schools I worked at, Mr. Moskoff, and that’s the truth.”
The files contain reports by informants who have never been publicly identified. But one operative known as “Blondie” and “Operator 51” was later revealed as Mildred V. Blauvelt, a police detective who went undercover for the Board of Education in 1953 and was credited with exposing 50 Communist teachers. Later, in a series of newspaper reminiscences, she said her hardest moments came when, posing as a Communist hard-liner, she had to argue disaffected fellow travelers out of quitting the party.
Other material was collected for a documentary, “Dreamers and Fighters: The NYC Teacher Purges,” begun in 1995 by a social worker and artist, Sophie-Louise Ullman. She died in 2005, but the project, accompanied by a Web site, dreamersandfighters.com, has been continued by her cousin Lori Styler. The unfinished work is narrated by the actor Eli Wallach, whose brother, Samuel, was president of the Teachers Union from 1945 to 1948 and was fired from his teaching job for refusing to answer questions before the superintendent of schools, Dr. William Jansen. Samuel Wallach died at 91 in 2001.
“They called everybody a Communist then,” growled Eli Wallach, 93, in a telephone interview, still bridling over the way his brother was treated.
The Teachers Union, which was expelled from the American Federation of Teachers in 1941 before disbanding in 1964 and being succeeded by the United Federation of Teachers, maintained that “no teacher should be disqualified for his opinions or beliefs or his political associations.” State and city authorities countered that Communists were unfit to teach because they were bound to the dictates of the party.
When asked by Mr. Moskoff, “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?” many teachers refused to answer. They were then charged with insubordination and subject to dismissal.
In his case, said Mr. Adler, the math teacher, it worked out happily. In response to his challenge of the state’s Feinberg Law, which made it illegal for teachers to advocate the overthrow of the government by force, the United States Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.
He went on to a successful career as a writer of math and science books, settling in North Bennington, Vt. But although he renounced communism after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, he said, the F.B.I. in 1965 listed him as “a potentially dangerous individual who should be placed on the Security Index” — subject to detention in the event of a national emergency. Another teacher, Minnie Gutride, 40, killed herself with oven gas in 1948 after being called out of her classroom to be questioned about Communist activities.
Outside the written record, Ms. Harbatkin did discover unexpected moments of humanity. The Board of Education was often reluctant to oust a husband and wife when both were teachers, and her mother, who died in 2003, confided to her that after she told Mr. Moskoff she would never sleep again if she provided or verified the names of fellow teachers, he turned off his tape recorder “and told her to keep saying she didn’t remember the names.”
She was not charged and continued teaching into the 1970s.
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