Education: Report on the Conspiracy

• Share

After months of investigating subversives in U.S. education, Indiana's Senator William Jenner and his subcommittee last week reported to the nation. Highlights of the report:

¶Of the more than 100 witnesses who appeared before the committee, 82 refused to say whether they were or had ever been members of the Communist Party, and three more who admitted Communist Party membership refused "to supply further details."

¶At its peak (in 1948), Communist Party membership among U.S. teachers was about 1,500.

¶ In New York City, according to Dr. Bella Dodd, onetime national committee member for the U.S. Communist Party, the Communist-led New York Teachers' Union alone had 1,000 members in 1939. John Lautner, a party organizer in New York State until 1950, said that at one time he had had as many as 500 Communist teachers assigned to him to be "processed into the underground."

¶One witness testified that in the early '40s he had attended meetings of a New York City-wide unit of Communist professors with a membership of 100. On the City College teaching staff alone, he said, there were about 30 or 40 party members.

¶In Boston, according to Herbert Philbrick, former FBI counteragent, the "Pro-4" (i.e., professional) Communist cell had between 70 and 80 members, including between 20 and 30 professors.

The report sharply rejects the notion that a Communist teacher can keep Communism out of the classroom and just stick to his subject, quotes several impressive opinions in support of this point. "The Communist teacher . . . must not only make himself an agent of the class struggle," said Dr. Dodd (herself a teacher for twelve years at New York's Hunter College), "he must indoctrinate " other teachers . . . and he must see that their students are indoctrinated in the class struggle." Added Economist William Withers of Queens College: "The typical action of the Communist teacher is to become a popular person with students . . . to appear to be a courageous person . . . who is constantly fighting for what is idealistic."

Among specific cases cited:

PHILIP MORRISON, associate professor of physics at Cornell, admitted that he was a member of the party in 1939, and that he had gone right on working for the Communists until three weeks before his testimony last May. In 1942, he joined the Manhattan Project, was one of "a small group of experts who assembled, tested, and mounted [atomic] bombs used for combat in the Pacific."

DAVID HAWKINS, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, was a Communist until 1943, had been assigned to various Communist Party branches in California while at the University of California and Stanford. But in May 1943, he joined the Los Alamos project as an "administrative aide," later became the project's historian, with access to its secrets. Hawkins also testified that another member of the project, Frank Oppenheimer. brother of Physicist J. Robert, had been a chairman of a California Communist cell.