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The Structures of an Anti-Communist Offensive a DISSERTATION

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The Structures of an Anti-Communist Offensive a DISSERTATION UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE The Los Angeles Teacher Purge: The Structures of an Anti-Communist Offensive A DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Criminology, Law and Society by Zac Stone Dissertation Committee: Professor Elliott Currie, Chair Professor Valerie Jenness Associate Professor Teresa Dalton 2021 Ó 2021 Zac Stone TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii VITA iv ABSTRACT v INTRODUCTION 1 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE 12 FRANCES EISENBERG and LOCAL 430 25 COMMUNIST INCURSION AT CANOGA PARK 33 THE CALIFORNIA UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE 43 ADLER and THE BOARD 57 FRANK WILKINSON and PUBLIC HOUSING IN LOS ANGELES 64 OCTOBER 28, 1952 73 THE SAGA CONTINUES 82 THE DILWORTH ACT 88 THEY FOUGHT THE LAW 92 THE SUPREMES 105 ENDGAME 114 CONCLUSION 117 BIBLIOGRAPHY 135 APPENDIX A: DATA and RESEARCH METHODS 147 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the help of my indefatigable advisor. Elliott Currie is a fount of wisdom and a well of patience. I would also like to thank my committee members Terry Dalton, whom I always trust to speak frankly, and Val Jenness, whose check-ins over the years meant more to me than I can say. Thanks to my friends and colleagues who supported me emotionally whether they were aware of it or not: Matt Barno, Alex Fridman, Julie Gerlinger, Jason Gravel, Courtney Halyard, Peter Hanink, Gemma Juan-Simó, Taylor Kidd, Piper Mount, Sean O’Neill, and Curtis Retherford. Shout out to my folks, my brother Isaac, and my therapist Jim Linden. Finally, big thanks to my lovable little troublemakers: Coco, Squish, Tilda, Toni, Trudy, and Wallace. iii VITA Zac Stone 2007 B.A. in Journalism and Political Science, New York University 2007 Editorial Assistant, Vice Magazine 2008-2010 Editorial Assistant, McSweeney’s Publishing 2011-2012 Project Assistant, Death Penalty Focus & SAFE California 2012-2019 Teaching Assistant, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine 2015-2018 Graduate Researcher and Instructional Designer, Master of Advanced Study in Criminology, Law and Society program, UC Irvine 2019 Teaching Associate, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine 2021 Ph.D. in Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine iv DISSERTATION ABSTRACT The Los Angeles Teacher Purge: The Structures of an Anti-Communist Offensive by Zac Stone Doctor of Philosophy in Criminology, Law and Society University of California, Irvine, 2021 Professor Elliott Currie, Chair Progressive teachers working in Los Angeles public schools became the targets of a multi-pronged attack by anti-communist crusaders in the 1950s. This study examines the Los Angeles teacher purge as a case of formal extrajudicial punishment in which elected and appointed officials devised and implemented a complex scheme to exact economic sanctions on public school teachers for their beliefs. In this historical analysis, archival records from the Los Angeles Unified School District and the California Un-American Activities Committee, among other primary and secondary sources, reveal the machinations of an assault on the civil liberties of a select group of progressive teachers – labor union leaders advocating for racial equality in schools, housing, and the workplace. This study explores the collaborative efforts of local and state officials who exploited the legislative powers of investigation and capitalized on a nationwide anti-communist moral panic to fire progressive teachers. These efforts were aided by a U.S. Supreme Court willing to carve out constitutional exceptions for teachers based on anti-communists’ arguments about the national security threat they posed. Because the Los Angeles teacher purge did not involve the v private sector like most anti-communist firings did, the case offers a unique opportunity to scrutinize the logics of anti-communism as presented by elected and appointed officials both to the public and the judiciary and to hypothesize about the case’s contemporary implications. vi INTRODUCTION It is not difficult in 2021 to imagine how a vocal minority can come to exert significant power over a citizenry that has been consumed by fears of imagined enemies, monstrous people whose vision for America is diametrically opposed to the capitalist ideals of the American dream they cherish – a dream that, incidentally, looks more like Leave It to Beaver than, say, The Jeffersons. The story of the 1950s Los Angeles teacher purge – this story – will strike familiar tones to anyone who pays attention to current events. It is a story contingent, of course, on a confluence of particular historical contexts, but its lessons are still relevant and worthy of examination. This dissertation explores the series of events surrounding the firing of progressive Los Angeles teachers in the 1950s – the local school board joining forces with the state legislature’s anti-communist investigative committee to develop a workaround to the state’s tenure laws in order to fire teachers with histories of progressive activism; the court battles that enabled the purge and upheld it constitutionally; and ultimately the disintegration of that legal doctrine. This research examines the Los Angeles teacher purge as an example of extrajudicial punishment. The case is unique among other anti-communist efforts for the extreme level of coordination involved by formal actors – from municipal and state government officials all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court – to subvert constitutionally protected civil liberties by carving out exceptions for teachers and public servants. The anti-communist attack on public school teachers is exposed in this thesis as a collaborative effort by elected and appointed officials to dispossess progressive teachers of their livelihoods through a legal loophole, not for any type of criminal activity or deviant behavior but for challenging the deprivation of their civil liberties. The movement against teachers coalesced 1 relatively quickly, but the legal structure that was propped up to facilitate the purge collapsed with comparable celerity. Though it is a unique case, the ease with which the anti-communist crusaders were able to mount a Court-sponsored offensive against progressive teachers, albeit short-lived, offers itself as a cautionary tale with implications for the present and future that are worthy of consideration. SETTING THE STAGE California in 1952 had what now seems a scant 11.5 million residents, second to New York’s 15 million and roughly tied with Pennsylvania, boasting around seven percent of the U.S. population. Of those roughly 11.5 million Californians, about 40 percent of them lived in Los Angeles County – 4.5 million. Of those, nearly half had migrated to the city in the preceding 20 years. The Great Depression famously displaced many agricultural workers, and World War II had caused a sizable defense industry to pop up in California, bringing millions of migrants seeking work. As ever, California was struggling to keep up with a severe lack of housing. To add to that, the baby boom was just beginning to reveal a serious dearth of teachers. In the summer of ‘52, the city of Los Angeles was in the process of annexing 28 acres of Chavez Ravine for a public housing project called Elysian Park Heights, the brainchild of the LA Housing Authority’s Frank Wilkinson. It was an ambitious project, meant to house 17,000 residents in two dozen mid-rise towers, complete with multiple churches and schools and parks. From its inception, Elysian Park Heights had elicited outcry from two disparate groups – nearby property owners who feared the effects of a massive public housing project next to their land, and the longtime residents of Chavez Ravine. 2 Chavez Ravine was home to at least three distinct neighborhoods with hundreds of Mexican-American families living in small single- and multi-family homes until the city of Los Angeles, through the process of eminent domain, bought the land with the stated intention of converting it to public housing. Frank Wilkinson had personally walked door to door promising families who were forced from their homes in Chavez Ravine that they would be first in line to fill the new housing that was to be built. Before that could happen though, the city would need to condemn the entire 28 acres and raze all of the existing homes and structures. If we zoom out a bit momentarily, the bigger picture of 1952 also features HUAC and Joe McCarthy, amid the end of Harry Truman’s presidency and the beginning of a new, much more conservative regime led by Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president, vocal anti-communist and California’s own junior senator Richard Nixon. Unlike Truman, Eisenhower was no fan of public housing and he shared that antipathy with a growing segment of the population. In an effort to appease its detractors, the plan for the Elysian Park Heights project was drastically reduced; nevertheless the aforementioned property owners on the edges of Chavez Ravine – white ones primarily, with the support of some city councilors and local media – teamed up to sue the city to prevent them from building any public housing there. PRELUDE TO A PURGE In late August of 1952, Frank Wilkinson testified on behalf of the LA Housing Authority at the Elysian Park Heights condemnation hearing, something he had done many times as the agency’s Director of Information. Wilkinson came to court that day with a strong record of public housing advocacy, and for racially integrated public housing at that, which – yet a couple years before Brown v. Board – was still a contentious proposition among some circles. Not 3 Wilkinson’s, however. Frank and his wife Jean were communists. To be a communist in the United States in the 1940s and ‘50s meant supporting racial equality. It meant promoting better living conditions and working conditions for the other half and particularly improving the wellbeing of Black Americans.
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