Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism by Andrew Feffer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism by Andrew Feffer Stephen Leberstein (bio) Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism By Andrew Feffer. New York: Fordham University Press, Empire State Editions, 2019. 328 pages, 6" x 9". $35.00 paper. In the first few years of the 1940s, the New York State Legislature authorized a committee known by the name of its dual chairs, Herbert Rapp and Frederick Coudert, Jr., to investigate the state's financing of public education and allegations of Communist influence in New York City's public schools and colleges. By the end of 1941 50 faculty and staff at the City College of New York and Brooklyn College lost their jobs before the Rapp-Coudert Committee suspended its investigation following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. This incident inaugurated the anticommunist purges of faculty at public schools and colleges that lasted until the 1960s. Despite the notoriety of the Rapp-Coudert Committee in its time, no full-length study of it appeared before the recent publication of Andrew Feffer's book, Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism. It remained largely unknown in our time despite its long-term influence, more recent scholarly articles, and an official apology to the surviving victims by the City University's Board of Trustees in 1981.1 Andrew Feffer has done an excellent job of explaining the history of this attack on the faculty of New York City's municipal colleges, mainly Brooklyn and City Colleges. While we might ascribe the purge that resulted to reactionary political forces, he shows how it was liberal intellectuals and politicians who took charge of this attack, claiming that [End Page 147] left-wing faculty were guilty of "bad faith" for their supposed radicalization of students. But he shows the depths of the "bad faith" of investigators who built their case solely on allegations that their suspects were guilty of refusing to admit to membership in the Communist Party. In its 1942 Report to the State Legislature, Paul Windels, chief of staff of the Rapp-Coudert Committee, stated that the committee's real intent was to change the culture of the public colleges, to instill the instinct of self-censorship and self-policing in the academic community, "that amorphous section of the public referred to under the collective heading 'liberals' and 'intellectuals.'"2 In his efforts to purge the public colleges of their troublesome teachers, Windels perversely showed how well he understood the importance of academic freedom for public discourse. If that purge succeeded in its aim of ridding the public colleges of their troublemakers, it did so by substituting the judgment of politicians for the professional autonomy that is the indispensable mainstay of academic freedom. Feffer's new book is an important contribution to a broader understanding of public higher education and its importance in the creation of an informed public forum. Perhaps the University of Wisconsin at Madison said it best when it adopted its inspirational motto in 1894 following the trial of Prof. Richard T. Ely, then director of the university's School of Economics, for participating in a printers' strike in Madison: "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."3 Unfortunately, the Rapp-Coudert Committee rode roughshod over the fragile protection of academic freedom at the municipal colleges. The origins of the attack stemmed from turmoil in the New York Teachers Union, Local 5 of the American Federation of Teachers. In the early 1930s newly hired teachers began joining the union, among them some members of the Communist Party and other left organizations, including Isidore Begun who helped assemble the Rank and File faction which fought for democratization of the union. Among other things, Begun put forward resolutions calling for the union to support the Scotsboro Boys in addition to "democratization" of the union. Other activists in the left factions were especially active in schools in Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, allying themselves with parents' groups fighting what they often saw as the...