One never knows when a casual encounter may change your perceptions of events or people from your past.
My wife’s reading group had an end of season gathering at the leader’s home Monday. Among the 15 people there, Gilda conversed with Barbara Nash.
Barbara is the daughter of Julius Nash, my sophomore year biology and junior year chemistry teacher at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn.
Gilda was commenting to a small group that the Trump era has given her a greater understanding of how people back in the early 1950s could become ardent followers of Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against alleged communists in government. Barbara related that her family had been deeply affected by the Wisconsin senator’s impact on innocent people.
Julius Nash had been a teacher in the New York City school system. Back then the Board of Education required teachers to acknowledge if they were members of the Communist Party. Nash said he wasn’t.
Apparently, before he became a teacher, he had been. When his past, as well as that of numerous other teachers, became known, the BOE fired them in the early 1950s, mostly because they refused to name names of other teachers with similar backgrounds.
Unable to teach, Nash had a hard time finding employment, partly because of the publicity surrounding the BOE action. He was often in the news, championed by The New York Post, back then a decidedly liberal, pro-labor tabloid. Ultimately, he was hired by a Huntington Long Island toy store, initially unpacking boxes before advancing in responsibility.
His daughter recalled those years as difficult on the family. He worked six days a week at the toy store, a two-hour commute each way. On Sunday he taught school at their temple because the family needed the money as he had suffered a vast pay cut from his teacher’s salary. “He was constantly exhausted and I saw a lot less of him. I was too young to understand what happened,” Barbara wrote me.
In the fall of 1963, the Yeshivah of Flatbush added him to the faculty as a biology teacher. The next year he also taught chemistry. In my chemistry lab class your most vivid memory was the day Mr. Nash was demonstrating what happens when hydrochloric acid is added to water. The reaction was not what he expected. Nothing transpired. Which prompted someone to suggest adding more water to the beaker containing the HCL and H2O. Again, the reaction was not what he expected—the mixture boiled and exploded the beaker, sending shards of glass into the students closest to the lab table.
We learned a valuable lesson that day—never add water to hydrochloric acid. Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt. It was an amusing anecdote from my high school years. Too bad we did not know at the time that Mr. Nash was among the bravest of Americans, willing to stand up to assaults on our First Amendment rights and, later, for academic integrity.
I commend to each of you the linked chapter from Marjorie Heins’ 2013 book, “Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/margeheins/other-books/naming-names-in-new-york-city-1).
It’s rather long, so here’s a summation of key points:
Hoping to rid the New York City school system of left-leaning teachers, the Board of Education required all applicants to aver they never were members of the Communist Party. Lying would be grounds for dismissal. Teachers could avoid being fired if they named names of other alleged Communists.
“I don’t want to be an informer. I think it is against lots of principles going back to Jesus Christ. Nobody likes or praises Judas for being an informer,” Nash told his inquisitor, Saul Moskoff.
On March 17, 1955, the BOE passed a “forced-informer policy” by a 7-1 vote.
“With the forced-informer policy now in hand, Moskoff re-interviewed those ex-communists who had refused to name names. Five persisted in their refusal: Harry Adler, Julius Nash, Irving Mauer, Samuel Cohen, an elementary school principal, and Minerva Feinstein, a teacher-clerk.”
In late August 1955, “the board directed School Superintendent William Jansen to suspend (without pay) Irving Mauer, Julius Nash, Harry Adler, Samuel Cohen, and Minerva Feinstein because they had balked at informing.”
“Nash, Mauer, and Cohen were also charged with lying when they denied communist affiliation on their employment applications.”
Nash et al appealed their punishment in court. New York’s Court of Appeals found in their favor in May 1959, but the BOE “still balked at reinstating the five teachers.”
After more legal wrangling, “the Board responded that it would drop the charges based on alleged violations of the Feinberg Law, would therefore reinstate Adler and Feinstein, but would proceed against Nash, Mauer, and Cohen on the perjury charge. (The Feinberg Law, passed in 1949, “mandated administrative machinery to enforce two earlier state edicts: the first, dating from the World War I period, barred anyone who made ‘treasonable or seditious’ utterances from teaching in the state’s public schools; the second, enacted in 1939, barred from civil service anyone who advocated the forceful overthrow of the government or joined an organization with such an aim.)
The case dragged on. A new BOE took office in September 1961, “the previous one having been fired en masse by the state legislature for corruption.”
A year later, the new Board reinstated four teachers. “Only Irving Mauer and Julius Nash were fired: the Board found no reason for mercy because it agreed with the trial examiner and Moskoff that some of their answers had been ‘evasive.’”
Fast forward to January 1967 (after we graduated): By a 5-4 vote, “the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Feinberg Law. Reversing its ruling 15 years earlier, the Court (per Justice Brennan) now said that the definitions of ‘seditious’ and otherwise punishable expression in the law were too vague, thereby casting a ‘pall of orthodoxy’ over the classroom, and that the law’s pervasive scheme of loyalty investigations, and particularly its presumption of guilt from membership in the Communist Party, violated the First Amendment.”
September 1972, the Board voted to reinstate the wrongfully fired teachers. “There were still financial details to work out. By November 1973, the settlement was finally in place for 33 teachers, including Nash and Mauer. More than 20 years after the purges began, and 18 years after the forced-informer policy, some of its aging victims could collect their pensions; there were lump sum payments to the estates of those who had died.”
According to Barbara Nash, though the teachers sought back pay for the near two decades they were denied the opportunity to teach, they were unable to secure anything more than their pension funds because New York City was in dire financial straits in the early 1970s. To pay them back wages would allegedly bankrupt the city, she was told.
Another twist to the story: Barbara’s brother Michael earned a Ph.D. in labor history at Cornell and an MLS at Columbia. He was the director of the Tamiment Library of NYU from 2001-2012, when he died suddenly. Barbara suspects from the date of Marjorie Heins’ book that Mike worked with her when she did her research. “He certainly was an expert on this story,” Barbara told me.
I checked with Marjorie Heins. “Yes, I knew Michael and interviewed him for my book, and as Director of the Tamiment Library, he also made it possible for me to do much important research there. If you look in the index to my book, you’ll see where I mention my interview with Michael. I also thank him in the acknowledgments.
“His tragic death was a great loss for American history.”
If you believe, as I do, that the McCarthy era was one of the darkest periods in our nation’s history, you will come away from this note with a greater appreciation of one of the unsung heroes of that time. For his beliefs, Mr. Nash and the other 32 educators received the 1973 Florina Lasker Civil Liberties Award from the New York Civil Liberties Union “for their collective struggle over 20 years to vindicate the principle of academic freedom.”
Mr. Nash was a man who stood for principle. And not just as a non-informer. Several years after we graduated Mr. Nash discovered that some student grades he had submitted to the administration had been changed for the better. When he inquired as to why, he was told, according to his daughter, that higher grades would help students get into better colleges and universities.
The reason did not sit well with him. “He objected so strongly to the grade fixing, which was not only unethical, but illegal, that the principal felt he couldn’t be trusted and fired him,” Barbara related. “He signed an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) and was paid $20,000 to go away quietly.”
Coda: Julius Nash died of congestive heart failure in 1994. He was 86.
“When my father was dying,” Barbara told me, “I asked him if he regretted having taken this stand (against the BOE) and sacrificing his career. He said that someone had to stand up to them and stop them and it just turned out to be him. Notice the passive voice. It was typical of him not to brag or paint himself as a hero.”
