Art Deco in reply to j r says:

As a general rule, I think you’re right, with several qualifications.

1. At least some of the 140-odd people prosecuted under the Smith Act were party officials whose salary was paid with laundered money provided by a hostile foreign power. That should have been worth some time in the clink.

2. The woman in this story was a school teacher. She was terminated after public hearings she herself requested and which even her defenders admit were conducted in a professional manner. The writer for the Boston Globe attempts to obscure this point, but she was a member of the Communist Party for 12 years and change; had allowed her membership to lapse just months before this case began percolating and just 3 years and change before these public disciplinary hearings were held. What summaries have been published of any accounting she gave of herself indicate she did not repudiate this 12 year period in her life. Jessica Mitford was once interviewed about her time in the Party and she said that she and her husband had left more-or-less because they’d concluded it was not a going concern anymore and had departed the front organization they were active in because the federal infiltrators had made it such a chore; you get the definite impression that her take on things was similar to Mitford’s.

3. You think it’s bad business for public agencies to be subjecting people to inquisitions over their politics. Well, so do I. The thing is, education is indoctrinative, so some inquiry into what she thinks about the world she lives in is legitimate. People in this country are and have long been in favor of providing schooling through public agencies which are effective monopolies (Don’t bitch to me about private schools. I grew up in a sophisticated 2d tier metropolis before the economy of Catholic education had imploded; the private schools still only enrolled 12% of the available students; in outlying towns, it’s 0%). We’d be better off with voucher-funded private schools juxtaposed to tuition-funded private schools, but we do not have that. The way to community control lies through local boards, and it was the local board reflecting community sentiment that unloaded her.

4. The FBI was invested in this case (putatively against the advice of their local office). That actually is something of a scandal. The woman in question was tainted, but she was not engaged in federal crimes and never had been. It isn’t the business of the federal police to be engaged in what Catholic ethicists call the sin of detraction. (Keep in mind, though, that detraction was effective only because local people did not wish to employ her).

5. One has to sympathize with the terrible time the woman had making a living. That applies across the board to anyone in a situation in which they’re untouchable.

6. That having been said, people like this do not get ink from the likes of Ellen Schrecker or The Boston Globe because they’re sympathetic with the untouchable. The bookkeeper of my acquaintance who was hounded out of his tax perparer’s job (public meetings were called in that town, the local paper found the ugliest picture of him which had ever been taken and published it, and the prosecutor/fanatic who’d handled his case 14 years earlier was contacted for her commentary) won’t be getting any ink from Ellen Schrecker or the Globe. He’s just a sex offender who’d like to earn a living and live a quiet life, not a crusader for a better world.

7. And the Globe and Schrecker do not give any evidence of giving a rip about anyone else who’d like to be left alone or about the freedom of association and freedom of contract of anyone who does not think like arts-and-sciences academics or newspaper editors.Report