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The militant spirit of the teachers' unions was not applauded by all educators. School administrators, mending fences with the business community, were alarmed at the radicalism of groups such as Local #5. Older teachers objected to the stridency of young radicals. While younger teachers pressed for higher wages and more jobs, older teachers sought pensions, tenure, and professional standards. Communist teachers, among the most militant, alienated many moderates. In 1939, in the midst of the AFT national convention in Buffalo, the Hitler-Stalin Pact was announced, and Communist delegates immediately moved from militant opposition to fascism to an isolationist, pacifist position. Such an ideological shift was too much for most non-Communist educators at the convention. They replaced AFT president Jerome Davis, a Communist sympathizer, with George Counts, an anti-Communist progressive. The election symbolized a shift to the Right that would continue in the 1940s, bringing the...
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This section contains 328 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
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