Student Politics
Rhoda Karpatkin
— The student left at that time was a microcosm of the world left, so it ranged — if you're literal about the left and you mean left of center — it ranged from the Students For Democratic Action, say, over to whatever the then-expression was of youth involved with the Communist Party, and it included Trotskyites and various places in the spectrum of progressive youth. And for each mark on the spectrum there was a student group. It could have been eight people or eighteen, but it was there. And I seem to remember years spent in the cafeteria arguing about nuances in our different positions. It was part of the intellectual growing-up work that we did. We really did believe not only that we had the one truth, whatever our particular truth happened to be, but that we had an absolute right to express it, whether it was in the cafeteria or in the classroom or at meetings or in campus demonstrations. Part of that came, I think, from the aftermath of World War II, where the concept of rights, of inalienable rights, of fighting a war to preserve those rights, was still very vivid.
Gene Bluestein
— Yes, there were demonstrations for various issues. I don't remember all of them but Germania Place was the center. It was just right around the corner from Brooklyn College and we were there every week for some demonstration for some good cause, whether it was civil rights or politics. It's just a little square and it was the site of all demonstrations, that's where everything happened. Then we would campaign for progressive people who were running for office — Marcantonio who was a red but great on many issues, and other people, most of whom I've forgotten now. My wife and I actually canvassed for Marcantonio in Harlem. Boy! I'll tell you, that was an experience. But I used to go to Harlem all the time, we used to go to the Apollo and we used to go to dance, saw all the great black bands and performers. And the Savoy Ballroom was a big hangout, and it was great times.
Bill Taylor
— Well, it didn't strike me at the time that it was a campus seething with political awareness, not in the same sense that the campuses became politicized during the '60s. And then in the wake of Vanguard, I discovered all these groups I didn't even know about. I mean, there were Trotskyites and Shactmanites. They were all very small groups, but I was sort of invited everywhere after that so I began to know more about what was happening than I knew before.
Herb Dorfman
— There was a surprisingly large amount of political activism on campus. A lot of groups met all the time — SDAs and ADAs and LYLs and Young Communist Leagues. You could find twelve in any given two-week period that were having big meetings, you know, and attracting a lot of people. People liked to hear them talking. I went to quite a number myself just to hear what they were saying. It all amounted to, in my feeling, the same sort of thing — incidents which in their eyes became a general trend. You know? There was a black kid who got beaten or killed or something of the sort, and that was tragic and you wanted something to be done about it. But it didn't necessarily mean that every single black person — or Jewish person, you know — was being treated that way. And after all, we're talking about college kids. You know? Their education was not exactly complete yet.
Harry Baron
— And when I went to Brooklyn, you were either a liberal, or else you were a soapbox agitator. And I didn't relate to these guys too well because I was a little leery of them. I said anybody who has to get up and yell like that — you can't prove anything by haranguing, that was my position. So you know, I'd listen, and they didn't convert me.
Harry Baron
— There was a big protest because of a change in the curriculum and the students were up in arms about that. They were wrong. [President] Gideonse was right. I remember at the time I thought, "Well, you know, it's not their job. They're not running the school." And if he wants to put in a particular system you have no say over it, really. But, no, protest, protest. They didn't like it.
Mike Lutzker
— The leaflets which we gave out at the gates, our leaflets protesting this or that or commenting on American policies or whatever, had to contain the names of two students. Well, I would sign it M. Lutzker. I had a cousin attending Brooklyn College at the same time whose name was Morton Lutzker and he — after a couple of these leaflets, he came over to me and said, "You know, I plan to go to law school. If my name appears on these leaflets I don't know that I'm going to get to law school. So I want you to write your full first name on the leaflets."
Ann Lane
— And Charlotte Goldberg, whose name might appear somewhere — she was not on the paper, she was the President of the Labor Youth League — she sat in at Harry Gideonse’s office in that early period, which became commonplace in the '60s, but was shocking — I mean, nobody sat in at the President's office. So there was stuff that happened, and we of course, would automatically sympathize with the underdogs, the students and the teachers who were being fired.
Bill Taylor
— Koestler’s book, I remember — "Darkness at Noon" — made a big impression on me because he wrote so vividly about what happened to people in the Soviet Union who fell out of favor. And Orwell's "1984" was just such a masterpiece, I think, that that certainly helped mold my thinking. And I just think culturally it was an extraordinary time. I remember going to see "Death Of A Salesman," and Tennessee Williams' was, I guess, "Streetcar." The Broadway stage was incredible in those days. And I wasn't very into jazz at the time, but I was a little bit. And, you know, here were Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach playing at the Metropole, right above Times Square. What can I say? It was just an incredible period of creativity and ferment. And that's not the way people generally think about the '50s.
Mike Lutzker
— Franklin Roosevelt had died in '45, a shock to everybody who had grown up on the various presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt. And who was he succeeded by? Harry Truman, unprepared for the presidency. Truman was not our ideal. He was not someone who we thought was going to play a constructive role toward a peaceful, postwar world. And then, in order to scare hell out of the American people to get the Truman Doctrine passed and the Marshall Plan, Truman set out to arouse the American people to the menace of Communism. This was not, for Henry Wallace, the answer, and was not for people who were believers in Henry Wallace — who we felt should have been the successor to Roosevelt. So it wasn't long before, on campus, we had a group called Students For Wallace, which after the election became the Young Progressives which Rhoda was the president of and I was a member of.
Myron Kandel
— Brooklyn had the stigma of being The Little Red Schoolhouse and so on, and there obviously were, as the hearings showed, there was a Communist Party cell or whatever, whether it was in Brooklyn or in the city or whatever. There were Communist Party members. Not every Communist was a bad person and was looking to overthrow the government. They just felt that that system worked better and they were not disillusioned by what we later learned or what was coming out about the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Mike Lutzker
— In June of 1950, when the Korean War began, the Young Progressives were invited to meet with a faculty committee to demonstrate how our program was different from the Communist Party. We had to prove section by section not only that we weren't Communists, but that we had a program that was different from the Communist Party. Prior to that, when the Young Progressives tried to register on campus, every student group needed a faculty advisor. Well, here were all these distinguished scholars, some of whom had come here because of the oppression of Nazi Germany, and we asked them to be our advisor, which only meant that they would sign off on our requests for rooms and approve our speakers, and I still remember how many faculty members turned us down and how intimidated they were. We finally found a physics professor who was one year from retirement, Professor Peaks. I remember his name. Professor Peaks said he didn't agree with our program but he felt we had a right to meet on campus. We thought after all the other faculty we had asked, that was a really principled position. So when we were summoned before this faculty committee, he led our delegation. We decided it was a kangaroo court, loaded dice, and we read a statement in which we criticized the committee for this kind of set-up and read an excerpt, as I recall, from "Alice In Wonderland" and stalked off with a feeling of total betrayal by the university.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— You can't be the number one academic institution in America, notwithstanding how good your students are, if you're a Little Red Schoolhouse. But you need to probe that a little. The student body was about ninety-five percent Jewish, almost all of it the children of immigrants. You would find, as you might guess, that almost anyone there who thought about anything in the way of issues would be more liberal than not. Not everyone was engaged, but people were certainly more liberal than not liberal. And nobody there came from a rich family, 'cause if your family had money you were not likely to be there. You would be someplace that charged tuition. So the student body was not typical of student bodies in other colleges. But if you took a poll among the students to see how many would accept the designation "red," you wouldn't find students who would feel that was a correct identification. It was imposed by the outside.
Ann Lane
— My first week at Brooklyn College in 1949 I joined a picket line. Herbert Aptheker was banned from speaking at Brooklyn College, and I can't remember if it was officially because he was an active member of the Communist Party or because he had been in jail because he was a member of the Communist Party. He was banned, and I joined the picket line, but he didn't come. He finally came a couple of years later. And he was such a boring speaker that we all wondered why we had stuck our necks out. [The picket was probably organized by] the Labor Youth League. I don't think it was the Young Communist League. And I didn't know who they were. I didn't have a political background of anything beyond liberal Democratic as a kid. And then Harry D. Gideonse, the President, sent an announcement around that every student who was not in class during that hour when the picket line was on was to be reported to him. And my teacher was Marion Starling, the first African-American woman and I think the first African-American teacher at Brooklyn College. And she was a southerner and she lied — she covered for me. She put me down as present. She told me this afterwards that she did this, and she said to me, "I'm trying to protect you from these dangerous political activities. I don't want you to get into trouble. You're young and you're just starting out." And she said — and I remember this 'cause it's an old southern aphorism — "you catch more bees with honey than with vinegar. So don't confront and don't provoke. Just do it through the back door." So she not only covered, but she gave me her political take on what I was doing.