In effect, that’s what those I admired most did, with a fierce moral rectitude I associate with my father. In his FBI file, which we got under a Freedom of Information Act request, the agents repeatedly report him as “adamant”—a perfect characterization of his principled stance. There are scenes I remember vividly of his encounter with those agents, who appeared annually at our door well into the 1960s. They wanted to know if he’d changed his mind about cooperating with what was apparently an ongoing project to root out subversion. Holding a copy of the U.S. Constitution, pedagogue that he was, my father would instruct the agents in the Bill of Rights, reading its relevant provisions out loud. “Didn’t you boys learn this for your job?” he’d ask.
This defiance, of course, had its costs—material, social, and psychic. My father lost his income and his pension; my parents lost friends who shunned them for fear of being implicated in their politics. And then there was the betrayal by those once considered comrades who went over to the other side. For years afterward, my father would shake his head at the “conversion” of Bella Dodd, once a Teachers Union stalwart and a close family friend, who—apparently in the face of a Communist Party inquisition of its own—found solace in the Catholic Church. The New York bishop to whom she confessed urged her to absolve her sins by naming names—my father’s among them.
The other side of this pain, though, was an amazing sense of solidarity that nurtured the children of these victims of the red purges, as well as their parents. The children had teenage clubs (ours was led by Alan Arkin) and summer camps (often run by fired teachers). The adults belonged to a community that maintained networks of connection for years, helping the unemployed find jobs, supporting their legal challenges attending celebrations of political wins, visiting the sick, offering eulogies at funerals. My father benefited from this network, which found him a series of jobs, none so rewarding as working with developmentally disabled children and advocating for group homes for them as part of the movement for deinstitutionalization in 1972. But when my mother died, Sam had their tombstone inscribed to capture the sense of vocation that never left him. “Ever teachers” is their epitaph. This was, in a sense, his final riposte to those who may have denied him a job but could never take away his calling. Tucked away in a rural cemetery in Western Massachusetts, this monument to the family story is foundational to my very being: one in which, no matter the costs, principled integrity is a priority, taking a stand means standing fast, and contesting the predations of the powerful gives meaning to the lives we lead.