FREEDOM UNDER FIRE
Botwright, William
A Case History Freedom Under Fire by WILLIAM BOTWRIGHT THE job I took last November with the Contra Costa Times was my first one as editor. The Times is a flourishing tri-weekly in the...
...College board chairman Kretzmer checked with state authorities and found this purported danger was an invention...
...On the basis of Hughes' description of the editorial, Lesher killed it...
...He had never before mentioned his misgivings about textbooks to the board...
...The character of McCunn's scholarship was best disclosed in a list of sources appended to the text of his speech...
...In one gambit, McCunn told newspaper reporters the district was in danger of losing a million dollars in state grants because the curriculum did not meet state requirements in the teaching of American ideals...
...There is a glowing light in true education, and in democracy itself, which the adherents to the Right cannot endure...
...I was able, however, to turn up a sales slip from the college bookstore, dated the day before the affair...
...Nor can the press always be counted upon to resist...
...The choice, one of them declared, was "between this great, patriotic American, Drummond McCunn, and a bunch of leftist teachers of questionable backgrounds...
...As evidence, he pointed out that the more truculent sayings of Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale had been inexcusably excised...
...Even though my resignation stood, I stayed in Walnut Creek for a couple of weeks before going on to another job...
...The colleges are now functioning without McCunn, and the teachers are free to return to the real problems of education...
...Students who went along to question the McCunn supporters' "analyses" were shouted down, pushed into chairs, and even spat upon...
...They included a banker, a chemist, educators, clergymen, lawyers, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals...
...The response was revealing...
...I editorially challenged McCunn and the Birch approach to Communism, but then dismissed the matter until one of my reporters turned in a rousing account of a meeting of the board of governors of McCunn's college district...
...Obviously, the report said, McCunn had deftly insulated and "courted" a college board "grossly remiss in its responsibilities...
...This danger made it clear that responsible citizens would have to take action to prevent such an event from occurring again...
...I did not argue then, but when Hughes strode into the office just before deadline and killed my exclusive story about the sales slip, I resigned immediately in protest against clear suppression of news...
...The uproar has subsided now...
...Every school system must be on the alert to such attacks, and repel them, for the Right has borrowed goals as well as tactics from the totali-tarians they purport to fight...
...McCunn demanded that newly-selected texts be sifted once again for subversive content...
...I had observed that they were liable to be brushed aside as subversive propaganda if they were unfavorable to McCunn...
...The college board then voted four to one to fire him...
...This group championed McCunn with briefs and delegations to the college board, letters and advertisements in newspapers, telephone campaigns, outside "expert" speakers, reprints, and smear sheets...
...So I put together a brief of minutes, transcripts, and photostats which told without adjectives just what McCunn had said and done...
...I reported in the Times that he had embraced the Birchers again: McCunn had promoted the Fred Schwarz anti-Communist crusade, then playing in Oakland...
...Almost lost in the shouting were two disturbing revelations: The first was that McCunn had been hunting closer to home...
...When he read the text of my editorial, written for that day's edition, stating that the Times would not be bullied into silence, he telephoned the publisher, Dean Lesher, who lives in another town...
...School boards, in the absence of strong and timely public backing, frequently capitulate to extremist pressures mantled in aggressive anti-Communism...
...there had been no suggestion of withholding state funds...
...He said the Society was putting up a gallant fight against the Communist menace...
...How could all this have gone on for so long...
...Jim Hughes, the newspaper's manager, became alarmed...
...McCunn denied that he had...
...A reporter familiar with the song observed it was no more than an innocent bucolic hymn to the American Thanksgiving, written twenty years before the Russian Revolution when the sickle was used, in Kansas as in the Ukraine, to cut grain...
...The McCunn group trooped out, announcing a rival meeting in a building nearby...
...The Teachers Association investigating panel convened without delay...
...But I had not counted on Dr...
...He rebuked McCunn at the next meeting of the college board...
...Scores of letters poured into the Times, most of them supporting my position...
...This brief was reproduced in quantity and it served as an anchor for a program to counter McCunn and his supporters...
...When I called Worthen following the meeting, he charged that Mc-Cunn had conspired with a pressure group to ambush the board with a surprise attack on his book, a recent edition of which contains a comment by a state official critical of the "pathetic" Birchers...
...It is freedom...
...Some said I was soft on Communism and others bluntly called me a Communist...
...Only William Kretzmer, the board chairman, did...
...Asked for an example, he cited a school songbook standard which begins "Swing the shining sickle...
...Shortly after I arrived in Walnut Creek, McCunn launched an energetic assault upon what he perceived to be the Communist conspiracy that eventually cost me my new job, and ultimately cost him his...
...We were fearful that the McCunn partisans might intimidate the college board into sweeping the investigating panel's report out of sight...
...A few days later McCunn spoke to 700 students at one of the two junior college campuses...
...A committee was formed called the Friends of the Junior Colleges...
...The report demanded McCunn's resignation...
...Perhaps in fear of being thought "soft on Communism," three board members meekly voted acquiescence over chairman Kretzmer's protest...
...From all parts of the county came people who were troubled and angry about what was happening to their junior colleges...
...But in what he had done the report found enough to brand him incompetent, dictatorial, boorish, Machiavellian, and ignorant...
...A student had asked McCunn at the meeting if he had bought the ninety copies of The Shape of English passed out during the attack at the college board meeting...
...I then wrote in an editorial that public, unsupported charges of subversion were not only unprofessional but' pure McCarthyism...
...The report reviewed a dozen years of turmoil and an astonishing array of charges: McCunn had been guilty of changing students' grades, countermanding administrators (thirty-four had resigned in twelve years), running secret "security checks" on teachers, using faculty "informers and fomentors of discord," publicly humiliating employes, expressing Tadal and religious prejudice, handing out propaganda in the schools, and using college district postage for anti-Communist crusade promotion...
...You drip, drip through the hammer and sickle—the words of Lenin," he said by way of expanding upon the devilish subtlety of it all...
...The report largely ignored McCunn's Birch statements on the grounds that he could say whatever he pleased...
...Also listed were a pamphlet by veteran anti-Semite Merwin K. Hart and a "speech on psychopolitics by Lavrenti Beria" fabricated by Kenneth Goff, a lieutenant of Gerald L. K. Smith...
...The McCunn faction worked overtime during the weeks between the closing of the hearings and the investigating panel's report...
...It was McCunn's embrace of the...
...They hired a lawyer and demanded an investigation...
...The second was that seventy per cent of his outraged faculty had voted that he be fired...
...John Birch Society, however, that made headlines throughout California...
...An elderly woman stepped up to denounce as degenerate The Shape of English, a textbook by faculty member Richard Worthen, used for years at the Concord junior college campus...
...McCunn's supporters steadfastly maintained the issue was one of loyalty...
...A band of McCunn partisans, nevertheless, demanded the floor for an "expert analysis" of subversive elements in the curriculum...
...I also observed that the crushing faculty censure demonstrated clearly that something in the administration of the college district was seriously wrong...
...He had told a Richmond newspaper that two texts and some teachers in his own district were pumping socialist notions into students contrary to California law...
...Teachers, board members, Parent Teacher Associations, and citizens would do well to appraise themselves in detail of the purposes, organization, strategy, and tactics of extremism on the Right...
...The "experts" included a number of veteran far Rightists from nearby Oakland and San Francisco...
...But he would not say which texts or what teachers...
...It is a measure of McCunn's influence that two earlier investigation reports highly critical of him, one in 1959 and another in 1961, had been quietly shelved...
...In an editorial entitled "McCunn Shows his True Colors" I called him a peddler of extremism of the most pernicious kind...
...The body which took on the probe was the Personnel Standards Commission of the California Teachers Association, made up of administrators, teachers, and board members, whose role it is to guard against abuse of the profession...
...The college board refused to be intimidated...
...The Times is a flourishing tri-weekly in the pleasant bedroom town of Walnut Creek, just east of Oakland, California...
...He refused to resign...
...It listed ninety copies of The Shape of English and was signed by Drummond J. McCunn...
...It just shows, he said, how long the collectivists have been up to their sinister stratagems...
...There were highly-charged ideological wrangles between a delegation of labor union spokesmen and a detach" ment of Birchers...
...The Times backed down sheepishly, and ran not only the suppressed news story but the editorial as well—over my signature...
...There remained the malleable stuff of public opinion, and the McCunn faction had been hammering expertly upon it...
...First, I wanted to nail down the facts in the McCunn case...
...Where the superintendent should be the chief spokesman and leader of public education," the report stated, "he has become its chief critic and focus of discord," creating a condition "deplorable, disastrous, and beyond all hope of being restored to an acceptable level...
...Meanwhile, telephone calls from advertisers started pouring into the newspaper office...
...McCunn, a former physical education instructor, reported he had been researching for years on collectivist "brainwashing" of American youth...
...A Birch member rose angrily and told Kretzmer to "shut up...
...When I covered the next college board meeting, I learned that to cry "Red" is still a reliable device for making your way in the Golden West...
...I ignored it all and kept digging into the Worthen book affair...
...McCunn spurned repeated invitations to testify...
...I suggested to a few people that we organize for action...
...With housewife Dorothy Powell as gadfly, the Friends served notice they would tolerate no tampering with facts and no smothering of findings...
...This did not faze McCunn...
...Drummond J. McCunn, superintendent of the Contra Costa Junior College District, which operates two campuses supported by a county tax levy and governed by a locally-elected board...
...It is something frequently on their lips, but rarely in their hearts...
...A revealing incident occurred then...
...It was a who's who of the lunatic fringe in education—John T. Flynn, E. Merrill Root, Anthony Bouscaren, Veritas, America's Future, the Daughters of the American Revolution...
...Hearing of the incident, the San Francisco Chronicle front-paged my resignation and the sales-slip story...
...he had handed out Merwin K. Hart's nonsense that the "One Worlders" were scheming to station Irish Catholic troops in California...
...Achieving an investigation was half the battle...
...There was such a community uproar that the college district board had no choice but to consent...
...The San Francisco Chronicle termed it "one of the most scathing criticisms ever made of an educator...
...In early May, the investigating panel's report was released to the college board and to the press...
...Some 130 other witnesses— teachers, administrators, and laymen—told what they knew...
...News media in a distressing number of cases have proven incompetent, indifferent, cowardly, or shamelessly irresponsible...
...Customers, the advertisers reported in dismay, had been threatening to boycott them because they advertised in a paper assailing McCunn...
...McCunn's concern about subversion first came to public attention during a state conference of college superintendents in San Francisco, where he warned that red-blooded Americanism had been "washed out" of textbooks and that many were now "slanted toward socialism...
...The line their propaganda took was that the investigating panel was a kangaroo court rigged by the profession's entrenched "progressives" and "collectivists" to pillory a man courageous enough to disagree with them...
...Meanwhile, the junior college teachers had united against McCunn for the first time in the thirteen years of his tenure...
...Kretzmer said he would tolerate no such attacks without advance notice, and silencedj the critic...
...he had refused to say what he thought of Adolph Hitler...
...The report destroyed what was left of the McCunn cause...
...Birchers and labor union spokesmen shouted at each other...
...The John Birch Society and numerous similar organizations have mobilized their members and sympathizers into disciplined guerrilla units using "dirty tactics" unabashedly borrowed by Robert Welch from the Communists and the Fascists...
...I was enjoying my new role, and thought I might stay...
...It made a good story, and a scoop, for the Times...
...Contra Costa County rallied in time to save its junior colleges^ But this upheaval is just one of scores that have broken out across the land...
...Members of Birch Society chapters and other backers of extremist causes formed a pressure group, seemingly well-financed, called the Parents and Taxpayers for Better Education...
...They worked effectively to inform the public of what had been happening in the colleges...
...This was not an unreasonable view, because it had happened before...
...Teachers and citizens had demanded that board members divorce themselves from McCunn's approval of Birchism...
...In many school districts bewildered citizens have recovered from initial disarray only to find the battle lost, books banished, and teachers silenced...
...A storm of letters and telephone calls, obviously organized, broke upon the Times...
...A John Birch Society member moved through the audience handing out copies of the book...
Vol. 26 • November 1962 • No. 11
