BOOK LAUNCH: Bad Faith

The New York Labor History Association is pleased to announce our sponsorship of an upcoming book launch this week, Feb. 12, 2020, at NYU’s Tamiment Library. Author Andrew Feffer will discuss his new book, Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism (New York: Fordham University Press, Empire State Editions, 2019).

More information on the book:

In late summer 1940, as war spread across Europe and as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, an anticommunist hysteria convulsed New York City. Targeting the city’s municipal colleges (focusing on Brooklyn and City Colleges) and public schools, the New York state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert investigation dragged hundreds of suspects before public and private tribunals to root out a perceived communist conspiracy to hijack the city’s teachers unions, subvert public education, and indoctrinate the nation’s youth.

Drawing on the vast archive of Rapp-Coudert records, Feffer’s study provides the first full history of this witch-hunt, which lasted from August 1940 to March 1942. Anticipating McCarthyism and making it possible, the episode would have repercussions for decades to come.

The committee’s first act was to subpoena the membership lists of the teachers unions, AFT Local 5 for the public school teachers, and AFT Local 537 for faculty and staff at the municipal colleges. By the end of 1941, about 50 members of the faculty and staff at City College alone lost their jobs, either fired or simply not reappointed, including the first African-American teacher at City College, historian Max Yergan.

The Rapp-Coudert probe set the stage for subsequent purges of the colleges by federal, state and municipal governments in the late ’40s, the mid-’50s, and on. Can this happen again?