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In late summer 1940, as war spread across Europe and as the nation pulled itself out of the Great Depression, an anticommunist hysteria convulsed New York City. Targeting the city’s municipal colleges and public schools, the New York state legislature’s Rapp-Coudert investigation dragged hundreds of suspects before public and private tribunals to root out a perceived communist conspiracy to hijack the city’s teachers unions, subvert public education, and indoctrinate the nation’s youth.
Drawing on the vast archive of Rapp-Coudert records, Bad Faith provides the first full history of this witch-hunt, which lasted from August 1940 to March 1942. Anticipating McCarthyism and making it possible, the episode would have repercussions for decades to come.
In recapturing this moment in the history of prewar anticommunism, Bad Faith challenges assumptions about the origins of McCarthyism, the liberal political tradition, and the role of anticommunism in modern American life. With roots in the city’s political culture, Rapp-Coudert enjoyed the support of not only conservatives but also key liberal reformers and intellectuals who, well before the Cold War raised threats to national security, joined in accusing communists of “bad faith” and branded them enemies of American democracy.
Exploring fundamental schisms between liberals and communists, Bad Faith uncovers a dark, “countersubversive” side of liberalism, which involved charges of misrepresentation, lying, and deception, and led many liberals to argue that the communist left should be excluded from American educational institutions and political life. This study of the Rapp-Coudert inquisition raises difficult questions about the good faith of the many liberals willing to aid and endorse the emerging Red scare, as they sacrificed principles of open debate and academic freedom in the interest of achieving what they believed would be effective modern government based on bipartisanship and a new and seemingly permanent economic prosperity.
Ground-breaking and insightful. Bad Faith makes important contributions to our knowledge of mid-twentieth century America, in particular its history of political repression, the union movement among teachers, and the roots of McCarthyism in the anti-communist liberalism of 1930 and 40s. A prodigious work of scholarship.---Marjorie Heins, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge
...when the Rapp-Coudert committee hearings get underway in New York City’s federal courthouse in October 1940... Seven hundred teachers and school personnel will be questioned–and scores of City College professors fired—in a purge of the New York City school system cheered on by the New York Times and the rest of the city’s media. Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism, by Andrew Feffer, is a thoroughgoing examination of this two-year inquisition authorized by the state legislature.
Feffer... captures the mania of the time, and it will shock readers as it details this dark time in our history.
Bad Faith's major strength is its detailed account of the impact that the liberal anti-communist movement had on New York City public school teachers and professors at the City University of New York. Just as important, Feffer’s work is a major contribution to the growing literature on American anti-communism. By turning our attention to the role that anti-communist liberals played in marginalizing those on the left during the Cold War, the author provides a richer history and clearer understanding of the political ideologies.---Clarence Taylor, The Gotham Center for New York City History
...all educators could benefit from this study of how vulnerable they could be... Recommended.
Bad Faith is an incredible accomplishment: the result of deep research and honest analysis that takes that research to the next level. Feffer never mistakes, as so many studies do, his findings for his argument—and ultimately it is his argument, about the way we think about and understand the left and liberalism, which we increasingly need to come to terms with while we cope with the political realignments of our time.
. . . historically persuasive and timely; it is a cautionary tale about future witchhunts.---Jimee Dee Kille, The Journal of American History
...Feffer has written a much-needed corrective to standard impressions of U.S. anti-communism... a brilliant job of resuscitating an important story about education workers in Depression-era New York.
Introduction 1
PART I: The Hearings
1 The Threshold 21
2 The Stooge Grebanier 36
3 Coudertism 54
4 Vichy’s Lawyer? 70
PART II: Class War
5 The Dewey Trial 85
6 The Educational Front 108
7 Far from the Ivory Tower 129
PART III: The Mortal Storm
8 Bad Faith 149
9 CCNY 174
10 Flirting with the Right 195
11 Communism on Trial 212
12 Aftermath 227
Conclusion: The Coudert Legacy 241
Acknowledgments 255
Abbreviations Used in the Endnotes 259
Notes 265
Index 317