Education: Brother, You Don't Resign

Last week 22 more teachers turned up in Manhattan's Foley Square Federal Courthouse to testify before the Senate subcommittee investigating Communism in U.S. schools (TIME, Sept. 22). Over & over again, Michigan's Senator Homer Ferguson and Committee Counsel Robert Morris put the main question: Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

The teachers did their best to avoid answering. They invoked the First, Fifth, Sixth and 13th Amendments to the Constitution. In the end, 18 of them took refuge in the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer. As they testified, they knew that the New York City board of education was listening. The board contends that under the city charter, any municipal employee—cop, teacher, fireman or bureaucrat—who refuses to answer on the ground of self-incrimination may be fired from his job.

Stigma & Tears. Some of the teachers used their turn on the witness stand for bellicose assaults on the committee's motives. Several members of the Teachers' Union made unfriendly remarks about their former associate, Bella Dodd, a repentant Communist who had been a friendly witness two weeks before (TIME, Sept. 22). Said Art Teacher Irving Glucksman: "I don't want to be a victim of any lying stool pigeon or any religious fanatic who thinks he is serving God by impoverishing the minds of children."

Only three of the witnesses denied that they had ever been Communists. Among the 18 who refused an answer was Frederic Ewen, who retired from his position as assistant professor of English at Brooklyn College rather than state his politics. He finally did admit, after Senator Ferguson reassured him that he was not incriminating himself, that he was an air-raid warden during World War II. Asked whether he had ever used an alias, another of the 18. German Professor Harry Slochower of Brooklyn College, rejoined: "Do you mean like when you go somewhere with someone? That is an embarrassing question." Pressed for a direct answer, he refused to give one. Cried James Nack, Teachers' Union treasurer, who testified that he was not a Communist: "Just being called creates a stigma which, if I were a woman, I would burst into tears ..."

Freedom of Soul. At one point the hearing came close to winding up as a melodrama. While Brooklyn College's Biology Professor Harry G. Albaum was testifying about his gradual seduction by the Communist Party, a hefty, ham-handed man slipped into a rear-row seat in the hearing room. Recognized by an alert committee aide as Constantin Radzie, who was born in Russia and became a U.S. citizen in 1937, the spectator was served with a quick subpoena and taken to the witness stand. Scowling like a wrestler, Radzie denied that he had been sent by the party to intimidate Professor Albaum. In the end, he invoked the Fifth Amendment as smoothly as a professor. He refused to say whether he was a party hatchetman or whether he was a member of Soviet military intelligence.

Albaum, on the other hand, told all.