Jane S. Smith's "A Blacklist Education"

Jane S. Smith writes about the intersection of science, business, popular taste, and social history. She received her B.A. from Simmons College and her Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught at Northwestern University on topics ranging from twentieth century fiction to the history of public health. She lives in Chicago, where she works in a very small room with a very large window.

Smith applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Blacklist Education: American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Blacklist Education explores one of several surprising sources of the official anti-communist program to purge left-leaning teachers, many of them Jewish, from New York City’s public schools. In a time of Congressional hearings about possible communist synpathizers in government and in Hollywood, the Superintendent of Schools of the largest public education system in the county was also deeply influenced by arch-conservative members of the Catholic Church. New York’s Cardinal Spellman, politically reactionary and rabidly anti-Communist, arranged the election of a conservative Catholic layman, George Timone, to the Board of Education. Timone, whose earlier pro-nazi sympathies of the 1930s had morphed into a crusade against a perceived communist menace in the classroom, immediately began a successful campaign to bar unions, ban books, codify principles of guilt-by-association, and otherwise suspend civil liberties for school employees.

But this is only one thread in the story, and readers need to go beyond page 99 to see the full scope of the book. A Blacklist Education sets the multiple historical sources and continuing effects of Red Scare hysteria against the plight of an individual teacher--who stands for all the teachers, librarians, actors, writers, government workers, and other “suspect types” whose names were too often lost in the blanket firings of a repressive era.

It took over fifty years for me to learn that my own father was one of those hundreds of New York City teachers pushed out of the classroom, a discovery that led me down one of the bumpier rabbit holes in American history. Suddenly I was petitioning for access to restricted archives and reading transcripts of secret interrogations where teachers, ignorant of either their alleged crimes or their accusers, could only prove their loyalty to their country and their fealty to the Superintendent of Schools by accusing other teachers of subversion. Other archives held collections of alarmist anti-communist pamphlets and newsletters, the ancestors of today’s conspiracy-minded broadcasts. These relics of Cold War panic attacked everything from the United Nations to the socialist tendencies of school orchestras; sinister “indoctrination” by liberal teachers was always a theme.

As I studied the contrast between the tales of subversive teachers and the real lives of the victims, ordinary people just trying to do their jobs, apocalyptic warnings jarred against my own knowledge of family devotion to civic duty and memories of patriotic trips to historic sites. As happens today, the consequences of applying ideology to education were powerfully destructive, not only for those who were directly attacked and their students, but also for a society bent out of shape by a culture of suspicion and retribution.

Visit Jane S. Smith's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Garden of Invention.

--Marshal Zeringue