Reds in Manhattan

Redhunters have long been eager to disrobe New York City's Teachers Union and College Teachers Union to see how pink they are underneath. Last week the unions' Reds got such a stripping that they had scarcely a rag left to cover their nakedness. There proved to be more Communist teachers in New York than even the Communists wanted.

The unions, Locals 5 and 537 of the American Federation of Teachers, began to feel the hounds' hot breath last summer when the Federation elected an anti-Stalinist executive council, pledged to cust the New York Reds. Last month the council got around to the job. At hearings in Chicago it demanded that the locals show cause why their charters should not be revoked. Charge: practices "detrimental to the development of democracy."

The College Teachers Union's quickwitted President Robert K. Speer recited a long list of democratic achievements by his local, demanded that the council itself show cause why his local should be ousted. Instead the council held perfunctory hearings, recommended that the locals be expelled, submitted its recommendation to a referendum of the Federation's 28,000 members, to be held within three months.

Last week the council produced some of its evidence. It made public an analysis showing a "perfect, uninterrupted parallel" between articles in The New York Teacher, Local 5's official publication, and changes in the Communist Party line. By "acrobatic teamwork" and "simultaneous somersaults," the council charged. The New York Teacher followed the Communists from isolation to collective security and back again to isolation.

Next day the council divulged a more damaging document: a report of the 1938 Communist Party convention in New York by one "J. Mason," believed to be a prominent member of Local 5. "Mason" referred to Local 5 as "our" (i.e., the Communists') local, and went on: "It has grown from about 300 three years ago to 7,000 today. We also helped set up the WPA and college teachers' locals of 1,000 each. . . . There are several hundred party members in the union. This is a big fraction and more than is necessary in our industry, if you wish to call it that. I think about 100 or so would be sufficient to work within the union; and so we have sent our party members into the apparatus of our party everywhere. . . . You fall over teachers everywhere."

That was only the beginning. The Rapp-Coudert legislative committee investigating subversive activities in New York City public schools, which last fall flushed a covey of Reds at Brooklyn College (TIME, Dec. 16), decided to resume its hearings, summoned as its first witness a red-pompadoured City College teacher named Morris U. Schappes. Day before the hearing Mr. Schappes, fearing that he would not get a fair break, summoned reporters to a hotel room. Flanked by Teachers Union officers, he announced that he had been a Communist for five years but resigned from the party a year ago to write an Anthology of Progressive American Literature. He insisted that he had done nothing subversive, that being a Communist had made him a "more understanding" teacher.

Next day, Mr. Schappes told the committee that when he resigned he was the sole surviving Communist at the college. To the witness stand then marched a spectacled City College instructor named William Martin Canning, who barked: "Schappes undoubtedly has forgotten." Mr. Canning spent two full days refreshing Mr. Schappes's memory. (Retorted Schappes: "An impostor!") Testifying that he himself had been a member of the Communist unit for two years, Canning named 50 fellow members, among them the college registrar, John Kenneth Ackley, known in the party as Jake. About one-half of one per cent of the 30,000 students and four per cent of the 1,400 college staff members were Communists, he said.

Under strict party discipline, faculty members were occasionally given proletarian tasks to perform "to prevent excessive pride." E.g., they had to paste surreptitiously on subway windows and pillars stickers with slogans such as Defend the Soviet Union and All Out May Day. Comrades had to get permission to travel, do scholarly research, study for higher degrees. The comrades mortally feared detection; one even wore gloves when he edited a campus Communist sheet, to avoid leaving fingerprints.

Ex-Comrade Canning also told the committee that he and his comrades tried subtly to class-angle their teaching. Once the unit rebuked a comrade for spouting to his pupils such Communist terms as ''dialectic materialism," advised him to use more finesse. One of the party's stunts was to enroll Communist students in the campus R. O. T. C. as "Bolshevist cadres." Object: to try to democratize the U. S. Army on the Soviet model.

Day after Canning named the City College Communists, a surprise witness, one Samuel I. Goldberg, took the stand. Mr. Goldberg testified that his 13 1/2-year-old son Richard returned from a camp last summer full of Communist ideas. The boy's camp counselor was a City College biology tutor. When the tutor recently invited Richard to see Fantasia with him, Papa said "No." The boy sulked. But last week Richard announced sunnily: "Daddy, you are right. I see Mr. Weisman's name in the paper. He's a Communist." Replied Mr. Goldberg: "Daddy's always right."

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