At least once, however, my parents’ beliefs got me into serious trouble. When my seventh-grade social studies teacher assigned the class a research paper on any one of America’s political parties, I asked my father for advice. Knowing that the CP was taboo, he mischievously suggested that I interview the chairman of the local Socialist Party — an organization he regarded as just a small tick to the left of the Democrats.
The local SP office was up a long flight of dusty, noisy stairs above a Chinese Hand Laundry on nearby Tremont Avenue. The entrance door was unlocked, and since nobody answered my repeated knocking, I let myself into a large room whose walls were bare of any posters. There were tumbleweeds of thick dust in every corner; a stack of gray, industrial folding chairs leaning against the far wall; an ancient leather couch whose gray stuffing leaked out of innumerable cracks and rips…and an elderly bearded man sitting on a chair behind a scratched and delapidated wooden desk. His head rested on his arms, which were folded on the desk, and his gurgling snores echoed throughout the room.
“Sir? Sir.”
No response.
“Excuse me? Sir?”
No response.
Not until I shouted, “Hey, mister! Wake up!” did he lift his eyelids, but not his head.
“What do you want? Leave me alone.”
When I informed him of my purpose, he snarled, then opened a desk drawer and grabbed a handful of pamphlets, saying as he tossed them on the desk, “It wouldn’t do you no good.” Then he fell back to his slumbers.
My composition basically repeated what I read in the pamphlets. Government takeover of industries. Income equality. Racial and gender equality. And so on.
My teacher was aghast, and my parents were summoned to meet with Mister Murphy, the principal. His castigation of me and (mostly) my parents reprised the rantings of the HUAC hearings we’d seen on TV and in movie newsreels.
Hadn’t America given “your people” freedom? Why were we then so un-American? Advocating revolution, atheism, everything this great nation stood for? Blah, blah, and blah.
My parents’ punishment was to have had to miss a day’s work, and mine was to spend the rest of the week in a kindergarten class. Squeezing myself into a tiny chair, being laughed at by my classmates, acknowledged by the teacher only when she needed the blackboard wiped clean. Instead of joining the rest of the kids for lunchtime recess in the schoolyard, I was required to remain in the schoolroom writing “I love America” a thousand times in my notebook while she ate her smelly tuna fish sandwiches and read the Daily News.
At the end of my last day in her class, her parting words were these:
“Charles, I hope you have learned your lesson.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I said, even though I really didn’t know what I was supposed to have learned.
She must have read my confusion. “What you have learned here, Charles, is that you must follow the noble path of American patriotism. Do you swear to God to do so?”
Instead of calling her a son-of-a-bitch, I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Author, professional basketball coach, columnist Charley Rosen, of Stone Ridge, has had nearly two dozen books published, both fiction and non-fiction. Read him at hoopshype.com or see his latest book, Sammy Wong, All American, which is on sale at the Golden Notebook, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Interesting personal story, but ignores a few crucial facts.
The Venona Cables established byeond any doubt that the leadership of the Communist Party USA was actively working with the Soviets to carry our espoinage in this country. The Venona files – released to the public thanks to Senator Moynihan – clearly show how the CPUSA recruited and vetted spies such as the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and hundreds of others. Along with the evils of McCarthyism (a term coined by the CPUSA itself), a balanced and historically accurate version of the CPUSA’s role in espionage should also be taught in schools.
For the real facts, read “Venona – Decoding Soviet Espionage in America” by HAYNES and KLEHR (Yale Univ Press) and Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s “The Haunted Wood” as well as “The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors” by Romerstein and Breindel.
It’s not that simple. Indeed, the Communists worked for organized labor and tenants’ rights and against racial discrimination, but they also actively championed a dictatorial regime, the Soviet Union, that was responsible for the deaths of 50 million people and, at its height, kept millions in prison camps. The idea that the Communists were the only people fighting for progressive causes in those years is basically a lie, perpetrated by the descendants of the Communists to make themselves feel better. There was an entire non-Communist left (people like Paul Goodman, Irving Howe or Norman Thomas) who fought for the very same things. As bad as McCarthyism was, that doesn’t mean automatically that the Communists were right.
Thanks for this! Having read your articles and books for years, I perhaps should’ve known that you came from such origins. (I hate the smell of tuna, I might add). Well I grew up in LA and knew a few educators and former actors and other Hollywood folks who were blacklisted and persecuted — mostly friends of my parents or parents of other kids I knew. People didn’t really talk much about what they went through (at least to this kid), but there was no missing the passion for underdog causes. I may have gotten my own belated dose of some of the nonsense in 1971 when I was 10. My elderly sixth grade teacher, “Miss S,” was a staunch Nixon supporter and would occasionally tell us how great he was (when she wasn’t singing the praises of Sam Yorty). Her speeches often occurred after the Pledge of Allegiance, which was frequently reviewed by Miss S in punitive detail. I knew that her take on things was drastically different than my Dad’s emphatic views. A few skeptical questions and a complaint about the Viet Nam war (and hair down to my shoulders) got me stuck in a corner of the classroom during a couple recess and lunch breaks. My parents were none too thrilled by this and they confronted the teacher… which got me in thicker soup for much of the remaining school year. My teacher lectured me on how I shouldn’t talk to my parents about what happened in our classroom. I didn’t buy it, and told her so as politely as I could. I’m pretty glad I had the stones to challenge her at that young age, though it took a few years to master the art of telling certain people to F off. At some point not long after my friction with Miss S, my Dad began to talk to me about how he was a reporter in the early 1950s, and about the McCarthy era…