Far from the Ivory Tower

This chapter recounts the increasingly bitter contest between communists and liberals in the American Federation of Teachers, as the Popular Front dissolved in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939. As Local 5’s offshoot, the College Teachers Union, under communist and radical socialist leadership, successfully established tenure rights for New York’s municipal colleges in 1938. The New York locals were challenged in the AFT by social democrats like George Counts, whose anti-communist campaign won the presidency of the national union, setting the stage for the Rapp-Coudert probe the following year.