Dear Commons Community,
My colleague, Steve Brier, sent along the news that Irving Adler, a former New York City teacher who became a prolific writer of books on math and science for young people after being forced from the classroom during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, died on Saturday in Bennington, Vt. He was 99.
From his New York Times obituary:
“Mr. Adler joined the American Communist Party in 1935, when he was 22. Sixteen years later, when he was chairman of the math department at Straubenmuller Textile High School on West 18th Street in Manhattan, he was subpoenaed to testify before a Senate subcommittee investigating Communist influence in the nation’s schools. He refused to answer the senators’ questions, citing his rights under the Fifth Amendment.
Within weeks, he was taken away from his students.
“I was teaching a class when the principal sent up a letter he had just received from the superintendent announcing my suspension, as of the close of day,” he recalled in 2009. He was later dismissed.
Mr. Adler was among more than 1,150 teachers who, in the anti-Communist furor of the cold war, were investigated under New York State’s Feinberg Law. Enacted in 1949, the law directed the Board of Regents to list organizations it considered subversive and deemed membership in those organizations prima facie evidence for firing any public school employee.
Called into the office of the school superintendent, William Jansen, Mr. Adler was asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Once again, he refused to answer. He was one of 378 city teachers ousted under the Feinberg Law and, based on his last name, became the lead plaintiff in the case known as Adler v. Board of Education.
In March 1952, after the case rose rapidly through the lower courts, the United States Supreme Court held in a 6-to-3 decision that there was “no constitutional infirmity” in the Feinberg Law, as Associate Justice Sherman Minton wrote in his opinion. Associate Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter dissented, declaring that the law “turns the school system into a spying project.”
The decision stood until 1967, when, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the Supreme Court reversed it with a 5-to-4 ruling that the Feinberg Law and similar statutes were unconstitutional. Dozens of dismissed teachers were eventually reinstated, and in 1977 Mr. Adler began receiving his annual pension of $14,901.”
Tony
