Reds in Brooklyn

Outside a small room in the County Court House in downtown Manhattan, a mob of 500 clamored to get in. A fiery, black-haired teacher-unionist, Dr. Bella V. Dodd, rushed about shrieking: "The hearing is packed!" Inside the room, jam-packed with newsmen and eager spectators, the curtain rose last week on a legislative investigation of subversive activities in New York City's public schools.

For four years the Hearst New York Journal & American had screamed that the city's schools and colleges were honeycombed with Reds. Bertrand Russell's appointment last spring to teach at City College (later overruled by the courts) was the last straw. Taxpayers, American Legionnaires and Tammanyites, who have no love either for Communism or the city's anti-Tammany school and college boards, got the Legislature to vote a sweeping inquiry into the State's educational system, including "subversive" activities in New York City.

The legislative committee decided to tackle Communism first. It placed this phase of the investigation in the able hands of two eminent, conservative Republican lawyers -- State Senator Frederic R. Coudert Jr., 42, and onetime New York City Corporation Counsel Paul Windels. Mr. Windels went to work in Brooklyn College, was warmly welcomed by its tall, tweedy president, Harry D. Gideonse (pronounced Gideons), onetime critic and foe of President Robert Maynard Hutchins at University of Chicago (TIME, June 13, 1938). Mr. Gideonse took charge of Brooklyn College last year, has bickered with its leftist students and professors ever since. One of their complaints: Mr. Gideonse once entered a restaurant through a picket line.

Last week's public hearings got off to a rowdy start. As Chairman Coudert announced rules of procedure, up popped a square-jawed young man with a black patch over one eye. He was William G. Mulligan, counsel for the Teachers Union, chief target of Mr. Windels' investigation. Mr. Mulligan demanded the right to cross-examine witnesses, was finally ejected by two policemen. Then Mr. Windels introduced his star witness, a genial Brooklyn College English professor named Bernard David Nino Grebanier.

Dr. Grebanier testified that he had joined a Brooklyn College unit of the Communist Party in 1935. His unit (one of three or four at the college, he said) had eight other members. Dr. Grebanier named them: eight of the college's best-known teachers, five of them still teaching there. Among them: former English Instructor David McKelvy White, son of Ohio's onetime Governor George White, who left the college to fight for the Loyalists in Spain; Philosophy Professor Howard Selsam; Mrs. Selsam. Party members were not told the names of comrades in other units, but once Dr. Grebanier attended a "fraction"' meeting of Communists in the Teachers Union, there found 100 members of the faculties of the municipal colleges, Columbia and N. Y. U.

The comrades, said Dr. Grebanier, met weekly in each other's homes,* discussed Marxism, united-front politics. Teachers Union affairs, how to vote in faculty elections. "It would be wrong to say," he explained, "that there was any deep-dyed plotting in these discussions." They also got reading assignments. Required reading: The Daily Worker, Life of Karl Marx, Earl Browder's Communism in the U. S. For dues ($25 a month), party literature, "Red Front" funds and the like, Dr. Grebanier shelled out $500 a year, more than 10% of his salary. On one occasion he had to get a bank loan to pay arrears.

By 1938 Dr. Grebanier had become fed up with the party, tried to resign, was finally expelled instead as a "Trotskyite." Today, thanks to the Moscow-Berlin pact, he told the committee, Communist membership at Brooklyn College has "dwindled to the vanishing point."

Next on the stand, went Mr. Gideonse.

Harrowing was his tale. When be became president, he found the college newspaper and student offices run by a leftist minority, the college's huge (14.000) student body without faculty guidance, assembly hall or space for extracurricular activities. He decided to hold student elections in classrooms, make everybody vote. Result: anti-Communists captured 17 of 20 places in the student council. Day of the election, leftists staged a peace demonstration. At an appointed hour, demonstrators suddenly blew whistles in college corridors, rushed into classrooms shouting: "Don't scab on peace." Promptly suspended were the demonstration's sponsors--the Peace Continuance Committee and American Student Union.

Next day, Brooklyn's radicals began to picket President Gideonse's home and office, by telephone. Their calls jammed his office switchboard, got him out of bed at home at 2 in the morning. Pickets also sent President Gideonse telegrams, had them delivered in dead of night. Said one, scaring Mrs. Gideonse out of her wits:

WE DEEPLY REGRET THE NECESSITY OF ANNOUNCING A DEATH IN THE FAMILY. The deceased: "Academic Freedom."

The hearings threw Brooklyn College into turmoil. Seven of the eight accused teachers hotly denied that they were Communists. (David White was silent.) In Brooklyn streets, small boys threw snowballs at Brooklyn undergraduates, hooted after them: "Reds, Reds." In the college, class work almost stopped. Indignant groups of students gathered in the halls, hissed Dr. Grebanier as he passed. Few doubted the truth of his testimony, but leftists and non-leftists alike agreed that

1) the accused teachers were among the best and most popular in the college,

2) Brooklyn's students, long accused of radicalism, now would find it harder than ever to get jobs.

Meanwhile, the Journal & American and the American Legion demanded that Brooklyn College's alleged Communists be dismissed, under a law (enacted last year) barring from civil-service employment those who advocate overthrow of the Government by force. But Investigator Windels and President Gideonse agreed that a teacher could not be dismissed merely for membership in the Communist Party, could be dismissed for "improper" political activity (e.g., classroom propaganda for Communism).

At week's end, not only dismissal but jail faced Dr. Selsam and 24 other members of the Teachers Union. Because they had refused, on advice of counsel, to testify at a private hearing before Senator Coudert, the legislative committee decided to cite them for contempt.

*Interviewed by newsmen, Dr. Grebanier's wife, Novelist Frances Winwar, revealed that she became so annoyed with her husband's visitors ("very disagreeable people") that she took a separate apartment on the floor below his.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.