Book Review: The School Administrator and Subversive Activities

Abstract

According to J. Edgar Hoover's latest census there are only 31,600 Communist Party members in the United States. Nevertheless, the deep subversiveness of school teachers seems to require the most extraordinary preventive measures. For example, the school authorities in Los Angeles felt called upon to require their employees, who had already taken a loyalty oath prescribed by the legislature, to take another oath to prove that they really meant it. Some of Los Angeles' satellite towns, to lessen any stigma in having teachers take two oaths, proposed that everyone else in the community take an oath at the same time. Thus the teachers, their loyalty doubly reinforced, were left only one oath ahead of those laymen who have to confine themselves to subverting their own children. Though Southern California's "reaffirmation of loyalty" represents a perhaps extreme instance of the measures described in Dr. Reutter's monograph, it indicates well enough why school administrators must be prepared to trim their sails to the prevailing winds of mistrust. His little book is, I take it, addressed chiefly to administrators, but lawyers will find it well-documented, and, within its narrow field, a useful description of one set of loyalty programs.