ABSTRACT
Anticommunism is analogous to racism and sexism. They function alike not only in silencing people and organizations and ideas at any one moment, but also in censoring the afterlife of those people and organizations and ideas in the records of their history. During the 1930s, the union grew in membership in the public schools of New York City, the private schools, and the colleges. In this period of the depression and the rise of fascism in Spain and then Germany, it fought against cuts in educational budgets in the name of national defense. The effectiveness of the Union on this and many other occasions was directly responsible for the right-wing attacks on it as communist. The attacks came from the New York Rapp Coudert Committee in the form of a witch hunt of union members. And in 1941, just a year after that award, the union was expelled from the American Federation of Teachers as a communist local.
