Oh, The Things You Can Find: Dive into the Special Collections, RED-ucators of Columbia University
While searching through the vastness or Gottesman Libraries Special Collections for material in support of the summer exhibition Student Voices in Print and Perpetuity, I happened across a gray, hard-covered archival folder. These folders are commonplace throughout the various collections housed in the Russell Hall catacombs, and often offer remarkable surprises.
What piqued my interest for this particular gray folder, I cannot say, but I think that we have all experienced the Poe-esque sensation related to inexplicable impulse to reach out for curiosities, to explore the various oceans of substance or circumstance set before us, often without reason.
Upon opening this particular piece, I could not help but associate it as timely to current events as it is telling of the past. RED-ucators at Columbia University, published in 1950, is a dossier issued by the National Council for American Education “as part of its campaign to rid the schools and colleges of Socialistic, un-American teachings and teachers”.
The NCAE was founded by Allen A. Zoll, a far-right American political activist, who also founded American Patriots, Inc, which was deemed a fascist organization and restricted for security concerns by the Department of Justice and both presidential parties in the 1940’s and 50’s.
Consisting of two parts, NCAE offers accounts of “87 Columbia University faculty members and their 589 affiliations with 229 communist fronts”, some of which had been officially recognized by “government agencies and investigating committees”, while others are local organizations “and are so new that no official agency has had a chance to report on them yet”.
While the National Council for American Education is fairly quick to acquit President General Eisenhower of any explicit wrong-doing, as his tenure had been of such a brief time and the situation was “one that he inherited’, he is, nevertheless, scrutinized for accepting a “grant from Moscow-controlled Polish government…to endow a new chair of Polish literature and language at Columbia” (Adam Mickiewicz Chair in Philology, Language and Literature)resulting in the resignation-in-protest of Dr. Arthur P. Coleman. Dr. Coleman was deeply concerned that the new position and chair would be used as “a pipeline for the infiltration of Communist ideas at Columbia”. Dr. Manfred Kridl, was to take over the vacant chair, but resigned under pressure from Sigmund Sluszka after accusing Kridl of being a “known Marxist”. More can be read about the controversy here.
This was not the only edition of RED-ucators, as dossiers were summarily published for Harvard University, University of Chicago, Yale University, University of California, Stanford, and California Institute of Technology—all available by mail for one or two dollars. NCAE also submitted these reports to the FBI, and incorporated into his own file.
The report lists each affiliation and suspected communist front in accordance with the official body or bodies that have listed them as such along with the number of professors associated with each. The official bodies, though lengthy are worth mentioning as it offers some insight into the insidious nature of the McCarthy-era reach, from high-level federal and state authorities, as well as smaller city and commonwealth municipalities:
- The Attorney General of the United States
- Committee of Un-American Activities
- Committee on Un-American Activities of the California Legislature
- Massachusetts House Committee on Un-American Activities
- New York State Joint Legislative Committee-the Rapp-Coudert Committee
- Special Sub-Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations’
- Wisconsin Committee of the Investigation of Charges of Communistic Teachings and Other Subversive Activities
- New York City Council Committee
- The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Council
Below is a full list of organizations and affiliates, each of which could inspire a much longer analysis of the geopolitical, racial, artistic, gender, and class relationships functioning in the landscape of Post-War America.
The final part of the report doxes individual professors at both Columbia University and its affiliates including Teachers College, Barnard, and the Union Theological Seminary. A few of the more notable “communist transgressors” to come out of Teachers College include:
The question of “RED-ucators” and the relative merits of Soviet pedagogy verses that of the western nations, primarily the United States became a highly contested subject area culminating in cultural, political, and educational clashes well into the 1970s, and various ephemera and documentation exists throughout many of our faculty, administrative, and research files, dating back to the 1930’s with the student-run newspaper Educational Vanguard and The Columbia Spark (available in RG 10—Library Vertical Files).
In 1954, the fourth annual conference of The International Exchange of Culture took place, highlighting the conflicting ideological student interests between communism/anti-capitalists and capitalism/anti-communists:
Other related collections, but by no means comprehensive:
- John F. Fischer
- Student Senate and Affairs (RG 24)
- Historical Dissertations
- Erling M. Hunt
- John K. Norton
For more information, please feel free to contact our Special and Digital Collections Librarian, Conrad Lochner.
