A General Air of Anxiety

“The personal is the political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United States. In 1951, when I was ten years old, my father, Samuel Wallach, a New York City high school teacher, was suspended from his job for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into communism in the public schools. He was fired for insubordination two years later—one of some 350 teachers who were fired or resigned in those years.

The history of my family was deeply affected by that event. I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life: there were unexpected visits from the FBI, subpoenas served, telephones tapped, subversive books wrapped in brown paper and stuffed in the back of closets, hushed conversations (in Yiddish, the household language of secrecy) between my parents. On the day of my father’s firing, when he called to report the news, I overheard my mother “congratulate” him in an ironic tone, her voice catching, tears in her eyes. I understood, in the way children do, the complexity of her response, without fully grasping the details. For years, we all breathed a general air of anxiety.

I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life. For years, we all breathed a general air of anxiety.

There was no protecting us from the publicity. The day after my father’s suspension, a student brought a newspaper clipping from one of the tabloids to my fifth-grade class for his “news and views” presentation. “Yesterday,” he began, “eight communist teachers were suspended from their jobs, and we know one of them.” I froze—my reaction was a mixture of fear and pride, but the teacher’s was protective. “Thank you,” she said, “that is all we have time for today; now class, let’s open our math books.” A few years later, during a schoolyard fight, a girl called me “the daughter of a communist dog.” There’s also a photo of me, my sister, and a few other children of fired teachers, picketing in front of the Board of Education. I’m holding a sign that says something about the Bill of Rights; my sister’s says, “My daddy is a man of courage; he should be admired, not fired.” From an early age, we knew that his fight was ours too.

My father took on the grand inquisitors with an impressive defiance, like many others of his generation. Jane Smith’s new book, A Blacklist Education, describes how her own father—also a public school teacher—responded to questions about his communist affiliations. Among other things, he asks if the lawyer interviewing him is pursuing fascists, racists, and antisemites with the same vigor. “I’m the one asking the questions,” the lawyer replies impatiently. Steve Batterson’s The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis (2023),a biography of the mathematician who was fired from the University of Michigan in 1953, recounts a similar scenario. During his hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Davis pointed out a logical flaw in the committee’s understanding of his answers. “I will assert again at as much length as you like, and in as much detail as you like, that I am in favor of the free exchange of ideas; that I am not in favor of forming one’s ideas by dictation. If you believe that membership in the Communist Party ipso facto means believing otherwise, then you will have to conclude that I have denied it. I am not willing to comment on it.” My favorite moment in Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer came when someone, commenting on the protagonist’s craven performance before the Atomic Energy Tribunal, asked why he hadn’t told them just to “fuck off.”

In effect, that’s what those I admired most did, with a fierce moral rectitude I associate with my father. In his FBI file, which we got under a Freedom of Information Act request, the agents repeatedly report him as “adamant”—a perfect characterization of his principled stance. There are scenes I remember vividly of his encounter with those agents, who appeared annually at our door well into the 1960s. They wanted to know if he’d changed his mind about cooperating with what was apparently an ongoing project to root out subversion. Holding a copy of the U.S. Constitution, pedagogue that he was, my father would instruct the agents in the Bill of Rights, reading its relevant provisions out loud. “Didn’t you boys learn this for your job?” he’d ask.

This defiance, of course, had its costs—material, social, and psychic. My father lost his income and his pension; my parents lost friends who shunned them for fear of being implicated in their politics. And then there was the betrayal by those once considered comrades who went over to the other side. For years afterward, my father would shake his head at the “conversion” of Bella Dodd, once a Teachers Union stalwart and a close family friend, who—apparently in the face of a Communist Party inquisition of its own—found solace in the Catholic Church. The New York bishop to whom she confessed urged her to absolve her sins by naming names—my father’s among them. The other side of this pain, though, was an amazing sense of solidarity that nurtured the children of these victims of the red purges, as well as their parents. The children had teenage clubs (ours was led by Alan Arkin) and summer camps (often run by fired teachers). The adults belonged to a community that maintained networks of connection for years, helping the unemployed find jobs, supporting their legal challenges attending celebrations of political wins, visiting the sick, offering eulogies at funerals. My father benefited from this network, which found him a series of jobs, none so rewarding as working with developmentally disabled children and advocating for group homes for them as part of the movement for deinstitutionalization in 1972. But when my mother died, Sam had their tombstone inscribed to capture the sense of vocation that never left him. “Ever teachers” is their epitaph. This was, in a sense, his final riposte to those who may have denied him a job but could never take away his calling. Tucked away in a rural cemetery in Western Massachusetts, this monument to the family story is foundational to my very being: one in which, no matter the costs, principled integrity is a priority, taking a stand means standing fast, and contesting the predations of the powerful gives meaning to the lives we lead. I think about this now, as the concerted attack on education mounted by the Trump administration is being met more with institutional silence or compliance than with resistance. From one perspective, this is not so surprising; there was little institutional resistance from university leaders during the McCarthy period, as Ellen Schrecker’s history, No Ivory Tower, so clearly shows. Still, watching the craven response of so many to the imposition of authoritarian rule has been upsetting. With the mission of democratic education itself at stake, I expected resistance, even from those who were administering the neoliberal university as a corporate autocracy, treating education as an enhancement of human capital and knowledge production as a private commodity rather than a public good. What we got instead was the appalling testimony of Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik—now chief economic advisor for Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK—who publicly named the faculty she promised to discipline or fire. (During the McCarthy period most of those who named names usually did so in secret, signaling something of the shame that attended such behavior.) Then there was the timid, legalistic squabbling of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania before the same congressional committee. From the Ivies to the public universities and colleges, university administrators have scrambled to remove commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from their mission statements in gestures of anticipatory obedience. Many have also complied with Trump’s misuse of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which denies federal funding to institutions that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or country of origin—by adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism that equates it with criticism of the policies of the state of Israel. As the end of DEI means a turn away from protecting the rights of women, queer, Black, and brown students and faculty, the new weaponization of Title VI makes antisemitism the only discrimination worth considering—and not “real” antisemitism, but political positions in support of Palestine and critical of Israel. Even though some schools, like Harvard, initially refused to accept the Department of Education’s terms for maintaining its research funding—in the name of protecting its institutional autonomy and academic freedom—they caved on the antisemitism question, agreeing to implement the Trump administration’s vision by removing professors of Middle East Studies from their positions, banning Students for Justice in Palestine, and admonishing faculty whose views Zionist lobbyists aim to discredit. Antisemitism hysteria is the new Red Scare.

Defiance had its costs—material, social, and psychic. The other side of this pain, though, was an amazing sense of solidarity.

My response to injustice these days is visceral rage at the powerful, but it’s not the same feeling I had in the oddly more optimistic time of the 1950s. Then I had the sense that justice was on the side of virtue—that my father was a hero, a David fighting Goliaths, whose evil motives would eventually bring about their defeat. There was justice and injustice and we were on the side of history. Now the attacks feel like yet another manifestation of the relentless self-preservation of the powerful, at the expense of the dedicated teachers and the school children whose education was in their hands. These days, as a much larger authoritarian behemoth wreaks havoc on democratic education in the name of white supremacist masculinity, I am no less committed to resisting, but without the belief that history is on my side. It’s a form of stubborn resistance that is the legacy of my father. My need to resist leads me to support others doing the same: the increasing numbers of courageous faculty whose petitions call on administrators to stand up to the attacks; the students and faculty condemning Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and, in the process, claiming their rights to protest under the First Amendment; the individual university presidents (Michael Roth, Patricia McGuire, Christopher Eisgruber, Gregory Washington) who have defied Trump’s bullying orders in the name of academic freedom, and their hundred or more colleagues who have signed a letter protesting “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in the academy. My immediate community of resisters is the American Association of University Professors, which has been producing statements, reports, and lawsuits at unprecedented speed. This is the latest chapter in my long education in the importance of communities of resistance, however implacable is the power we confront.

We are again confronting a massive attack on the very foundations of democratic education and, this time around, the stakes feel even higher. In the 1950s, the targets were individual teachers—communists, progressives, liberals—and their left-wing unions. Now the target is the system itself. Its value as a public good is being redefined as a matter of parental choice (vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling, all paid for by public funds), and its commitments to principles of equality and justice—to say nothing of truthful accounts of history—are being trashed. In their place, stories of violence and greed are forcibly imposed to glorify our nationalist destiny. I am reminded—for a second time in my life—that the stakes we have in a democratic system of education are always under threat and that, for those of us who value it, the fight for its preservation is an urgent, if never-ending, challenge. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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