While professional associations connected to higher education such as the American Association of University Professors fought to defend its members against the anti-communism of the 1950s, evidence suggests that teachers’ unions failed in this role. Drawing upon the archival records and publications of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, the following paper argues that the ideological inclinations of union leaders hindered their efforts to protect K-12 public school teachers. The attacks on academic freedom rights during the McCarthy era would thus have implications for years to come in regard to the ability of K-12 teachers to exercise their intellectual autonomy.
　　Keywords: Academic freedom, anti-communism, labor history, teachers’ unions.
　　Academic freedom has long been recognized as a concern in higher education, with organizations such as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) clearly defining in their founding statements the pressing need for the right of college and university faculty to intellectual independence.1 The literature regarding academic freedom in higher education is thus replete with incidences of serious abuses of academics and their institutions as well as valiant efforts on the part of professional associations to defend its membership against anti-intellectual elements within the society (Richard &Walter, 1955; Joel, 1992). This is especially the case in the period of 1951-1954, during which the political leadership in the United States used accusations of disloyalty against prominent Americans, including many college professors, in order to promote draconian measures levied against the population as a whole.2 In one notable case, Johns Hopkins University China affairs specialist Owen Lattimore was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities(HUAC) in 1952 as a result of having been named a Communist conspirator by ex-Communist Party (CP) member Louis Budenz (Ellen, 1986, pp. 164-166). On these occasions, professors were provided vigorous counsel by their professional organizations. In the case of John H. Reynolds, a University of Florida (UF) political scientist who was interrogated by HUAC in April 1953 on the subject of his connections to the“Harvard Cell” of the CP in the 1940s, an AAUP official defended Reynolds at an internal meeting of the UF Board of Trustees, thereby ultimately saving Reynolds’s position at the university (Florida Times-Union, 1953, pp.11, 25). While these efforts were not always successful, they nevertheless provided a template for defending the rights of academics to intellectual autonomy inside and outside of the classroom.
　　The same cannot, unfortunately, be said of the record of the two major teachers’ unions - the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) - during the McCarthy era.3 This startling lack of activity in defense of teachers during one of the darkest periods of attacks against academic freedom can at first seem perplexing and has led to a number of competing theories in the literature. Marjorie Murphy, for example, has argued that teachers have traditionally been hindered in their efforts toward effective organization and defense by the conception of teaching as a profession4. In contrast, Michael Apple has tied the lack of concern for the academic freedom rights of K-12 public school teachers to a process of “de-skilling,” in which the traditional professional obligations of teachers have been progressively stripped from them in the effort toward standardization of curricula and teaching practice5. These contrasting notions have a good deal of merit and yet I will advance a third argument with regard to the McCarthy era: that is, in stark contrast to the record of the AAUP and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the activities on the part of the NEA and AFT and its state affiliates during this period were seriously compromised by the adoption of a unique and complex notion of academic freedom that specifically precluded the defense of teachers charged with communist involvement.
　　This paper will trace the history of American teachers’ unions in relation to their conceptions of and activity in regard to the academic freedom of K-12 public school educators. In exploring the ideological direction of the NEA and AFT in the 1950s, this paper poses several questions: how did the origins of the NEA and AFT influence its activity with regard to teachers’ academic freedom? In what way did the prevailing political atmosphere of the McCarthy era account for the lack of response on the part of the union leadership? How did other political groupings affect the ideological trajectory of the AFT and NEA during this period? In answering these questions, this paper considers the ways in which the leadership and membership of teachers’ unions responded to the perceived national security crisis of the early 1950s. The paper utilizes the published records of union activities during the period in organs such as American Teacher. In addition, the author has examined internal AFT and NEA documents housed at the University of Florida and the State University of New York at Binghamton. This paper provides a detailed look at a fascinating and prescient period of American educational history that projects important issues and questions for the investigation of contemporary threats to academic freedom in the post-9/11 era.
　　Conceptions of Academic Freedom:
　　Academic freedom has long been regarded as part of the liberal democratic tradition and as a sacrosanct principle in the realm of academia.6 Philosophers such as John Stuart Mill expressed the need within such a society for engagement in multiple points of view, even deliberate falsehoods, without fear of suppression:
　　In the modern era, these philosophical statements have been inscribed in proclamations such as “Article 19” of the “United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which declares that, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions, without interference, and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.7 The right to academic freedom emerged in the United States from discussions within nineteenth-century university communities. As Geoffrey Stone reports, the late nineteenth century represented a period of “genuine revolution” in American higher education (Geoffrey, 1996, p. 64)8. These debates were energized by discussions surrounding two issues – American universities’ responses to Darwin’s theory of evolution and the influence of the German university. Reflecting on his numerous pilgrimages to German universities of the day, for example, William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, remarked:
　　When for any reason the administration of a university or the instruction in any of its departments is changed by an influence from without, or any effort is made to dislodge an officer or a professor because the political sentiment or the religious sentiment of the majority has undergone a change, at that moment the institution has ceased to be a university(William, 1938, p. 23).
　　Academic freedom is thus so closely entwined with the history of higher education as to be described by Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger as “concurrent with the development of the university from the twelfth century”.( Hofstadter and Metzger, p.3)
　　The history of American public schools is not nearly so clear. The American public school system, or“Common Schools” in the contemporary parlance, rose as a direct response to the insights of major figures in the Common School reform movement. As Carl Kaestle noted, reformers such as Horace Mann, Henry Barnard and Catherine Beecher were appalled by the lack of professionalism among the predominantly male teaching faculty, the outdated and mechanical nature of the curriculum and the extremely decrepit qualities of the facilities common to many Antebellum school systems (Carl, 1983). Common schoolers were further motivated by a reformist desire borne of their middle class, Protestant roots to improve society. Kaestle summarizes the principal tenets of Common School reformers:
　　The sacredness and fragility of the republican polity…;the importance of individual character in fostering social morality; the central role of personal industry in defining rectitude and merit; the delineation of a highly respected but limited domestic role for women; the importance for character building of familial and social environment (within certain racial and ethnic limitations); the sanctity and social virtues of property; the equality and abundanceof economic opportunity in the United States; the superiority of American Protestant culture; the grandeur of America’s destiny; and the necessity of a determined public effort to unify America’s polyglot population, chiefly through education (Carl, 1983, pp.76-77).
　　This seemingly contradictory ideology with its twin thrusts of individual rights and public solidarity thus produced a school system that was at once revolutionary in its structural reforms and yet hostile to dissent from without or, especially, from within. These institutional changes, while no doubt improving the nature of schooling, also had the result – perhaps even intentionally so – of stripping some of the autonomy from the teaching faculty. Indeed, the curricular reforms undertaken during the Common School period were perhaps the first instance of what Michael Apple and Linda Christian-Smith refer to as “teacher-proof” materials (Michael& Linda, 1983). While few would recommend a return to the widespread use of corporal punishment in American public schools, its gradual removal from the classroom management arsenal represents an example of the loss of control and autonomy for public school teachers.
　　With the standardization of curriculum and the increased professionalism of the teaching field came the institutionalization of the teacher training process in so-called “Normal Schools.” Christine Ogren has listed the many virtues of Normal Schooling, among them that these institutions provided working class and immigrant women with employment opportunities unthinkable a generation before.9 Institutions such as Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Women’s Seminary, opened in 1832, also advanced the Common School reformers’ goal of“feminizing” the teaching faculty, as reformers viewed women as more natural and nurturing educators of youth. This sentiment, perhaps inadvertently, led to a gendered split between teaching and administrative tracks that continues to this day. Ogren notes that female graduates of state normal schools tended to teach for a few years before marriage, whereas “men tended to move quickly from teaching into school administration, which had more status among middle-class professions”. (Christine, 2005, pp.82-83) This bifurcation between teaching and administration has had far-reaching effects on the competing notions of academic freedom afforded to teachers and administrators. As this division between teaching and administration became institutionalized in Normal Schools, the gap between research and practice – still a key issue in terms of ascribing rights to academic freedom – grew apace.
　　Teachers’ Unions and Academic Freedom
　　The division between the halls of administrative power and humble teacher practice that emerged from the history of nineteenth-century public schooling influenced the respective origins and paths of the two major teachers’ unions - the NEA and AFT. While the initial “call” for the August 1857 inaugural meeting of the National Teachers’ Association (the forerunner of the NEA) in Philadelphia was made to “all practical teachers,” it was couched in the language of professionalism rather than in the tradition of radical trade unionism.10 The constitution that emerged from the Philadelphia meeting included a preamble that summarized the nascent organization’s mission: “To elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and to promote the cause of popular education in the United States, we, whose names are subjoined, agree to adopt the following constitution”. (National Teachers’ Association Proceedings, 1857, pp.11-12) As Marjorie Murphy described it,
　　The NEA, from its inception in 1857, was an organization of educational leaders, most of whom were school administrators. It was not until 1912 that classroom teachers were recognized with their own department and not until after the AFT was formed in 1916 that the NEA began actively to recruit rank-and-file teachers (Murphy, 1990, p.5).
　　As a result, the NEA in its early years of operation advanced the mission of a professional organization of educators with scant attention to the intellectual nature of the teaching practice. Classroom practitioners were encouraged, in the words of William Russell, to “make their work a profession - not just an ordinary vocation”.11 Thus, as Edgar Wesley noted, the NEA in its early years operated as the equivalent of a medieval guild, its membership virtually closed to women and dependent on passing qualifying standards of professionalism12.
　　The AFT, on the other hand, emerged from the more radical activism of local teachers’ unions in large metropolitan areas, such as the Chicago Teachers’ Federation (CTF) formed in 1897. Marjorie Murphy recounts that the CTF was formed with goals that leaned more toward bread and butter, practical economic issues, such as wages and work conditions, than did those put forward by the NEA and its forerunners.13 Not surprisingly, then, the AFT took to the issue of defending the academic freedom of its membership more readily than did the NEA. During the First World War, a period in which German and radical Jewish teachers were under particularly intense state scrutiny, the AFT worked with the ACLU to devise a strategy for defending teachers’ intellectual rights against arbitrary dismissal. Joel Spring has detailed the efforts of the Wilson administration’s Committee for Public Information (CPI) in disciplining teachers accused of making anti-war statements during the period of the First World War.14 NEA members were therefore counseled by their leaders to display an enthusiasm for the war effort and cautioned against the use of any material that might be construed as dwelling on the horrors of war.15 In several large metropolitan areas, dozens of teachers were fired for their anti-war agitation outside of the classroom and for their suspected ties to the Socialist Party.
　　As a result of this first period of ideological purges in the classroom, both the NEA and AFT took serious steps in the intervening period between the world wars to develop formal committees for the defense of its memberships. The AFT reacted quickly to organize against the campaigns of several political figures tied to self-styled “patriotic” organizations, such as the American Legion, who demanded loyalty oaths on the part of public employees including teachers.16 Leading members of the AFT, such as Henry Linville, the founder of New York’s Local 5 and editor of the AFT main’s organ, American Teacher, vocally defended teachers under suspicion during the period and called on fellow teachers to do the same.
　　In response to the AFT’s activism in this arena and in an effort to broaden the appeal of the organization, the NEA formed the National Commission for the Defense of Democracy through Education (commonly known as the “Defense Commission”) in 1941. Rather than focusing solely on the issue of academic freedom for its members, the Defense Commission campaigned broadly on a range of issues related to teachers and the conditions of their work.17 Despite this broad mandate, the Defense Commission regularly campaigned against attacks against public education and on behalf of specific teachers in the early forties. Thus despite their differing origins, the NEA and AFT during a period leading up to the end of the Second World War provided valuable service to its membership around the issue of academic freedom. This fine record throws into stark relief the dismal role of teachers’ unions in the late forties and early fifties.
　　Teachers’ Unions in the Crucible of McCarthyism
　　The successful purges of radicals during these earlier “red scares” established a pattern that culminated in a series of public hearings held between 1951 and 1954, during which noted individuals in public life were subpoenaed and called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in order to testify about their alleged subversive activities.18 HUAC became a permanent standing Congressional committee in 1946 with a broad mandate to investigate charges of communist subversion within public institutions.19 This official mandate corresponded with an intensely patriotic post-war era during which committee members and HUAC’s advocates in the popular media issued sensational charges that supporters of the Soviet Union existed within the top levels of the federal government.20 While John Stephens Wood chaired HUAC during the early fifties, these hearings are largely remembered as the arena of Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, whose spirited interrogations energized the proceedings.
　　The popular memory of the McCarthy era today often focuses on the high-profile sessions involving Hollywood actors, writers and producers, many who were subsequently blacklisted as a result of their non-cooperation during the HUAC hearings21. However, because of their central role in socializing children, educators - including K-12 teachers - were frequently called before the committee. Those who refused to appear or to answer questions posed by McCarthy and other leading HUAC members – often citing the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination – were charged with contempt of Congress and held to large fines or imprisonment. School districts and universities also used these refusals as a pretext for firing teachers and university faculty.22 The first HUAC hearings involving classroom teachers were scheduled for April 1948, not coincidentally one month before the Congress was to debate a major educational funding bill.23 Indeed Marjorie Murphy contends that, “the first rumblings of the McCarthy era came with the fiscal crisis that would grow geometrically in the coming years”. (Ibid., p. 182.)
　　During the height of the McCarthy era, HUAC and other sub-committees interrogated thousands of teachers in states across the union. In many cases, Congressional sub-committees such as the McCarran Committee on Internal Security held hearings in local areas in order to collect information and to produce lists of informants and alleged communists and subversives within the teaching ranks in a more efficient manner.24 Teachers who refused to cooperate, such as eight members of New York City’s Teacher’s Union’s executive committee who refused to testify before the McCarran committee, were added to the list of names for HUAC to pursue and were subsequently prosecuted under each state’s anti-communist ordinance.25 This activity was all the more disturbing and puzzling in that it took place in the aftermath of several purges of Communist Party militants in teachers’ unions in the mid-1940s. Thus, Don Carleton points out, “great irony...that the Red Scare’s most virulent phase developed in the absence of any actual Communist organization”. (Don, 1985, p. 63) It therefore appears that the main thrust and aim of the McCarthy era witch-hunts of teachers was in removing any lasting vestige of progressive teaching remaining from the Depression era.
　　In each of these cases of attacks on teachers in the McCarthy era, the record of activity on the part of the NEA, AFT and their local affiliates appears to have been virtually non-existent. This is in stark contrast to the record of groups such as the AAUP and ACLU in acting in defense of college and university faculty in the same period. The case of University of Florida political scientist John H. Reynolds, illustrates this point. In April 1953, Reynolds was called to testify before H.U.A.C. on the subject of his connections to Communist organizations. Reynolds, who had completed his doctoral work at Harvard University, had been identified by other figures in the “Harvard cell” of the CP in the 1940s.26 Throughout this process, attorneys provided by the ACLU and accompanied by representatives of the AAUP, who promoted the case in its journals, represented Reynolds.27
　　What then accounts for the lack of support exhibited by teachers’ unions in cases in which the intellectual autonomy of teachers was under attack in the 1950s? While the Defense Commission doubtless engaged in a great deal of useful investigative work in support of teachers during the 1940s and 50s, Stuart Foster argues that,“it accepted the prevailing zeitgeist that a serious internal communist threat existed. As such, the Defense Commission betrayed itself as a victim of the fear and paranoia of the red scare era”. (Foster, 2000, p.23) The trajectory of the NEA and AFT during the McCarthy era shows a disturbing tendency to overcompensate in their efforts to appear respectably patriotic at a time when the trade union movement felt weakened by the attacks of patriotic organizations such as the American Legion and Chambers of Commerce. Indeed, throughout the period, the national commanders of the American Legion were invited to speak during the main plenary sessions of NEA conventions, often using the platform to attack the NEA and other educational organizations for harboring communists within their ranks. At the 1953 meeting, for instance, the national commander of American Legion Lewis K. Gough stated:
　　The real threat of communism to America does not come from the so-called downtrodden class. It comes from the men of eminence and distinction who have let themselves to be used in the communist cause. And I think it ought to be noted here that of this group, educators, and scholars comprise by far the largest majority (Lewis, 1953, p.59).
　　During the same period, NEA leaders regularly used their own addresses to inveigh against the influence of communism and to praise patriotic organizations for their efforts.28
　　During the era of McCarthyism, the leaderships of both the NEA and AFT adopted a unique and peculiar formulation that the rights to academic freedom for its membership were imperiled not by the investigations launched by agencies of the state nor by the demagogic campaigns of anti-communist organizations but rather by the suspected presence of communist or subversive teachers within their midst. For example, a statement on“Academic Freedom” adopted at the 1952 Annual Convention of the AFT states:
　　The danger is still imminent that manipulation of public aversion to Communism may and can be used as a means of silencing, intimidating, or eliminating progressive, liberal teachers from public schools (Report of the Legislative Committee, A.F.T., October 1952, 18).
　　In other words, teachers influenced by socialist or communist ideas were themselves a threat to the academic freedom of their peers, and thus, could not be afforded the rights of other teachers. Speeches by NEA leaders during this period also indicate that the organization felt that the most expedient method of rebuffing the “attacks on public education” by “the enemies of public schools” was to work in coalition with patriotic organizations in order to remove accused teachers, who might otherwise draw the attention of the state, from their classroom duties.29 The AFT Secretary-Treasurer Irving R. Kuenzli explicitly voiced this stance in a December 1951 editorial titled, “How about the attacks on the classroom teacher?” In the article, he blamed the criticism aimed at public schools on the presence of “Communists in schools.” Kuenzli commented:
　　The American Federation of Teachers, which by its constitution bars from membership Communists, Fascists, and others subject to totalitarian control, cannot logically insist that Boards of Education employ or retain such persons as teachers in the public schools (Irving, December 1951, pp.4-5).
　　Thus, while the AFT issued public policy statements through its journals that formally opposed the use of loyalty oaths and the practice of forcing teachers to testify before HUAC, neither the NEA nor the AFT took unconditional, principled stands against the terminations of teachers accused of CP membership30.
　　The first indication of this shift in union policy in regard to the defense of academic freedom occurred in the immediate post-war period. At the time, the pages of American Teacher were often devoted to coverage of abuses of academic freedom and calls for solidarity among the AFT membership in defense of fellow teachers. For example, in October 1945, American Teacher reported on the dismissal without cause of Violet M. Eastman, a high school teacher in Helena, Montana.31 In the same month, Arthur P. Sweet, a shop steward of the Pontiac, Michigan AFT local gave a speech to the Sixth District Convention of the Michigan Federation of Teachers ominously titled “Who Shall Teach?” Sweet stated the basic terms of the defense of teachers’ academic freedom:
　　To keep these super-teachers on the job we must provide an atmosphere of freedom. They must be free to teach and this implies many things -freedom from the pressure of clerical detail, freedom from the interruptions of administrative machinery, freedom to act as citizens as well as teachers, freedom to express themselves in criticism and development of administrational or educational policy. Need I mention that the greatest factor in obtaining these freedoms is a strong teachers’ union. This same freedom implies that these super teachers must also be disciplined…self-discipline imposed by the obligation of their profession. As leaders of youth they must hold themselves to the highest standards of conduct and character. They have no right to be average in morals or manners (Arthur, January 1946, p. 29).
　　Buried within this seemingly innocuous call for professionalism is the kernel of what would later become the AFT and NEA’s basic premise for denying its members a decent defense against accusations of subversion -the connection between teaching practice and moral character.
　　During the post-war period, articles in American Teacher urged teachers to conduct rigorous textbook analyses for content unsuitable to their instruction. Any textbook materials deemed unpatriotic or portraying American society in a negative light, especially in regard to issues of race, were to be placed on a list of titles and summarily removed from classroom use. Simon Marson, a Pennsylvania State University sociologist, writing in American Teacher in February 1946, urged teachers to take seriously the goal of removing this undesirable influence from American public schools:
　　The scientific analysis of the content of our textbooks with regard to such problems as labor, race and religion is highly necessary. We ought to know the kind of themes and symbols that are being communicated to generations of Americans. We ought, too, to know what effect these materials are having on the attitudes and social relationships of our pupils as they become citizens (Simon, February 1946, p.14).
　　The intellectual work of academics such as Marson in developing a response to the charges of communist infiltration of the educational field cannot be understated. Ellen Schrecker has cited that, “In fact, many of the nation’s leading intellectuals were directly involved with one or another aspect of McCarthyism”.32
　　Gerald Gutek has documented the influence of social reconstructionist writer and theorist George Counts in developing these ideas (Gerald, 1971). Counts, while at Columbia Teachers College in the 1920s and 1930s, had been initially attracted to the Soviet educational system. Social deconstructionism, as Lawrence Dennis noted, grew out of the view that schools in an era of crisis for industrial capitalism could not merely train students for future jobs within a failed economic system. Dennis comments that, after a lengthy and inspirational visit to the Soviet Union in 1929, Counts “came to believe that a planned economy had to be an essential feature of any well-run industrial society, and that view was reinforced on his return to America early in 1930, when he saw at first hand the effects of capitalism gone amok”. (Lawrence, 1989, p. 37) Writing in the depths of the Depression, Counts stated:
　　Any completely satisfactory solution of the problem of education therefore would seem to involve fairly radical social reconstruction. The fact is that for the most part contemporary society is not organized primarily for the education of its children or for the achievement any other humane purpose. Such matters are largely subordinated to the processes of wealth production and accumulation (Simon, February 1946, p.14).
　　Yet by the late forties, Counts had a much less sanguine view of Soviet education. Echoing the Cold War language of many leading figures in the NEA and AFT, Counts expressed the view that the Soviet Union represented a threat to the national security of the United States and, by extension, the schools and communities that they served. Speaking at the 1947 AFT convention in Boston, Counts remarked that, “Clearly the Soviet educational program contains a threat to the peace of the world and to the achievement of understanding among the nations.”33 Counts went on to participate in the purges of Communist Party members within the AFT.
　　Counts shared this rightward trajectory with a generation of formerly left-wing thinkers around the influential journal Partisan Review, often referred to as “The New York Intellectuals”. After an initial flirtation with Trotskyist anti-Stalinism in the 1930s, writers and critics such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Lionel Trilling took an increasingly rightward position toward U.S. foreign policy matters, especially in the period after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.34 Alan Wald argues that the writings of Sidney Hook and Irving Howe were particularly influential in NEA circles in New York (Alan, 1987). Wald comments that,“Like the apologists for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the New York intellectuals began to perceive aspects of both the history of the Soviet Union and the nature of American capitalism in ways that were more conducive to their new beliefs, ignoring facts that might have been discomfiting”.35 Much of this anti-communist work was centered on the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organization founded by Hook in 1939 that throughout the McCarthy era received generous funding from conservative foundations36. The group began to develop the conception of communism as a pernicious influence on American society, with florid formulations of “Red Fascism” and “Communazis,” culminating in a 1952 conference in which the group refused to take a position condemning McCarthy and HUAC37.
　　Largely as a result of this intellectual work, the NEA had, by 1949, decided to purge itself of all communist influence in its ranks. In a conference in Boston dominated by discussion of the effect of Communist Party members within the organization, a motion was raised during the first session of the NEA General Assembly by William Saunders, a delegate from New York: “Members of the Communist Party of the United States shall not be admitted or continued in membership in the National Education Association”. (NEA Proceedings, 1949, p. 91) While the body initially tabled the motion in lieu of further discussion, the matter of the expulsion of CP members reared its head once again during the second business session in a report from the Education Policies Commission delivered by John K. Norton of Columbia Teachers College. Norton stated the Commission’s conclusions on the issue at hand:
　　Finally, the commission after most careful deliberation concluded that a statement should be made which would leave no doubt in the minds of the public that American teachers have no sympathy with the ruthless, immoral, and anti-democratic movement - Russian communism - (applause) and that American teachers believe that a person who officially allies himself with this movement, representing as it does a challenge to everything which a free man holds dear, is not qualified to teach the children of a democracy (Applause). Accordingly, the Commission states: Members of the Communist Party of the United States should not be employed as teachers (Applause) (Ibid., p. 96).
　　After a lengthy discussion, the Commission’s conclusions were interpreted as an official proposal and passed by the NEA’s legislative assembly38.
　　In October of 1949, AFT president John M. Eklund drew the same conclusions in his address to the annual convention: “Very few would deny the conclusion reached by the NEA in Boston last July: that membership in the Communist Party is incompatible with teaching in a democratic society”.39 A fascinating convergence of rationales exists between the NEA Educational Policies Commission’s report and the AFT president Eklund’s address. John K. Norton, speaking for the Commission, clarified his remarks asking rhetorically,
　　“Shall persons who have pledged their minds to an international conspiracy, who have given away that intellectual integrity and freedom to think, which the very essence of is, and purpose of, academic freedom be permitted to teach our children?” (John, October 1949, p. 7)
　　Similarly, Eklund noted that,
　　“It is impossible for one who follows the dictates of the Politburo to teach objectively, for his teaching must follow the studied and exact design of world conquest. The pattern of the Communist Party’s thought control, which is blind subservience, is identical with the pattern of any thought control - ’ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die”. (Eklund, October 1949, p. 7)
　　In other words, members of the Communist Party were, according to the prevailing notions of the NEA and AFT in the early fifties, incapable of free thought and thus, by their very nature, exempted from considerations of academic freedom. Based on this ideological conception of academic freedom as a right to be preserved for some but not all teachers and union members, teachers’ unions during the McCarthy era, a period in which these rights were most pointedly under attack, denied their members these rights and, in many cases, assisted officials of the state in their anti-communist purges.
　　Conclusions
　　The documentary evidence cited above from NEA and AFT archival sources and contemporary newspaper articles leads to several important conclusions that support the view that the McCarthy era represents a sharp break from the traditional work of the NEA and AFT in defense of teachers’ academic freedom. First, it is clear that the NEA and AFT leaderships, in their political adjustments to the ideological priorities of the Cold War era abandoned their principled stances displayed in the interwar years of defending all of its members. The trajectory of the NEA and its Defense Commission during the early 1950s shows a disturbing tendency to overcompensate in its efforts to appear a loyal element of American society at a time when it felt weakened by the attacks of self-styled patriotic organizations such as the American Legion and Chambers of Commerce.
　　Moreover, it is notable that during this period the NEA and AFT fell under the sway of the formerly left-wing intellectuals, especially those associated with the influential journal Partisan Review, in developing explicitly anti-Communist ideas. Progressive educators such as George Counts played key roles in the purges of Communist Party members within the AFT based on the notion that the Soviet Union and its educational system, which had previously been viewed as a model for progressive education, now represented an unprecedented threat to American society. Intellectuals thus developed much of the scholarly arsenal later used by union leaders to call for bans of communists and other subversives within their ranks.
　　Last, and most important, the evidence shows that, during the McCarthy period, teachers’ unions began to adopt policies that specifically precluded the defense of those members found to be connected to the Communist Party. The speeches and writings of these individuals such as Corma Mowrey and Irving Kuenzli indicate their view that the right to a teaching practice free from interference was dependent on ridding from the teaching profession those elements that would bring undue suspicion upon the field as a whole. That the union leadership and much of its membership would forsake the rights of their comrades is indeed chastening and serves as a timely reminder in an era in which the solidarity of educators has once again been put to the test. Ellen Schrecker describes the result of this failure of will in the most poignant of terms from her own experience as a student:
　　It took forty-three years to find out what happened to my sixth-grade teacher at the Oak Lane Country Day School. A large, shaggy man with the gift of transforming daily life into a learning experience, he got a class of self-involved preadolescent girls interested in chemistry by having us make lipstick and we worshipped him for taking us seriously, as few adults did. Suddenly, one day in 1953, he was gone (Schrecker, 1998, p.9).
　　Reference
　　Apple, M. (1979). Ideology and Curriculum. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
　　Apple, M. W., & Linda K. C-S. (Eds.). (1983). The Politics of the Textbook. New York: Routledge.
　　Carleton, D. (1985). Red Scare! Right wing Hysteria, Fifties Fanaticism and their Legacy in Texas. Austin, TX: Texas Monthly Press.
　　Caute, D. (1978). The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower. New York: Simon and Shuster.
　　Counts, G. S. (1934). Social Foundations of Education. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons.
　　Counts, G. S. (November 1947). Some Recent Tendencies in Soviet Education. American Teacher, 19.
　　Dennis, L. J. (1989). George S. Counts and Charles A. Beard: Collaborators for Change. Albany, NY:
　　Eklund, J. M. (October 1949). Critical Problems Challenging the AFT. American Teacher, 7.
　　Evans, R. W. (2004). The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children?. New York: Teachers College Press.
　　Foster, S. (2000). Red Alert! Educators Confront the Red Scare in American Public Schools, 1947-1954. New York: P. Lang.
　　Goodman, W. (1968). The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
　　Gough, L. K. (1953). Greetings from the American Legion. NEA Proceedings.Washington D. C: NEA.
　　Graham, J. D. (October 1945). Union Teacher in Helena, Montana Dismissed Without Statement of Cause or Hearing. American Teacher, 23.
　　Gutek, G. L. (1971). The Educational Theory of George S. Counts .Columbus, OH: Ohio State University
　　Harper, W. R, (1938). Report of the President. President’s Reports, 1892-1902, xxiii. Chicago, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original published 1892).
　　Hofstadter, R., & Metzger, W.P. (1955). The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.
　　Hook, S. (8 May, 1953). Letter to the New York Times. 24.
　　Kaestle, C. F. (1983). Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860. New York: Hill and Wang.
　　Kille, J. D. (2004). Academic Freedom Imperiled: The McCarthy Era at the University of Nevada. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press.
　　Kuenzli, I. R. (December 1951). How about the attacks on the classroom teacher?. The American Teacher, 4-5.
　　Locke, J. (1995). A Letter Concerning Toleration. I. Kramnick (Ed.). The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1689).
　　Marson, S. (February 1946). Techniques of Textbook Analysis. American Teacher, 14.
　　Mill. J. S. (1859). On Liberty. M. Warnock. (Ed.). Utilitarianism and on Libert. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. (Original work published 1859)
　　Mowrey, C. (1951). United in Purpose - United in Action. NEA Proceedings, 16.Washington D.C: NEA.
　　Murphy, M. (1990). Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
　　National Teachers’ Association. (1857). Proceedings (1957, pp. 11-12). Washington, DC: NTA.
　　Ogren, C. A. (2005), The American State Normal School: an Institution of Great Good. New York: Palgrave McMillan Press.
　　Sanders, J. (1979). Cold War on Campus: Academic Freedom at the University of Washington, 1946-1964. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
　　Schrecker, E. (1986). No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press.
　　Schrecker, E. (1998). Many are the crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
　　Spring, J. (1992). Images of American Life: A History of Ideological Management in Schools, Movies, Radio and Television. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
　　Stone, G. R. (1996). A Brief Historyof Academic Freedom. P. Spacks. (Ed.). Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
　　Sweet, A. P. (1946). Who Shall Teach? American Teacher, January, 29.
　　U.N. (July 5, 2007). United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html. (Originally drafted 1948)
　　Wald, A. (1987).The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of The Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s.Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina.
　　Wesley, E. B. (1957). NEA: The First Hundred Years: The Building of the Teaching Profession. New York: Harper and Brothers