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HUAC Chairman Harold Velde left Philadelphia in 1953 with an admission of defeat.

The witnesses refused to talk, Velde said in his closing monologue. Instead, they say nothing. One can only draw the conclusion that, though many witnesses have emphasized that they are not today members of the Communist Party, they do not wish to help destroy the Communist conspiracy.

With that, Velde gaveled the hearings to a close.

HUAC may not have achieved its stated goals in Philadelphia. But it had done something. It upended the lives of the teachers in its crosshairs.

The temptation here is to essentialize to draw a clean narrative from the aftermath.

Did HUAC and the subsequent firings destroy these people? Did it stiffen their resolve?

The answer, as always, falls somewhere in between.

Life was certainly different after HUAC at times uncomfortable or worse. Children of the fired teachers recalled play dates canceled and friendships severed in the wake of the hearings.

I didnt feel people hated me, but its clear they were very scared, said David Drasin, whose father, Sam, was among those fired.

Davids mother, Sylvia, wouldve likely been fired, too, but she died of cancer shortly before the hearings began. The family pressed on because it had to.

For John Ehrenreichs parents, Joe and Freda, the firings were a bump in an already bumpy road.

In the late 1940s, Joe, stricken with tuberculosis, left teaching temporarily and moved to a sanitorium. To make up for the lost income, Freda got a job as a school counselor.

Fredas job was a lifeline for the family, but soon after the HUAC hearings she suffered a serious heart attack and had to quit. Within a year, Joe had been fired and Freda sidelined by ill health.

We were pretty poor, said John. We did continue to get some help from my uncles and from some of the family friends. But things were tight.

The scramble for jobs led the teachers in all sorts of unpredictable directions. Herman Beilan became a traveling salesman. A former teacher named William Soler worked at a dental supply firm. Another, Solomon Haas, became an exterminator. Isadore Reivich got into the dry cleaning business.

For some teachers, the events set off by the HUAC interrogation seemed to throw their lives completely off axis.

English teacher Sophie Elfont lived alone in a small apartment in Philadelphias Germantown neighborhood. She never married or had children. Relatives described her as exceptionally bright and caring, but not well-suited to withstand the attention that came with her firing.

Afterward, her world seemed to narrow.

It was devastating for her, said nephew Mark Elfont.

Another relative told me she scratched out a living working for a clipping service. Shed scour the newspaper every day, cutting out articles for a coterie of clients.

She was able to maintain our independence, but it wasnt easy, her nephew said. She certainly did not have an easy life.

Sophie died in 1987. She was alone, Mark Elfont said so alone that it took about two days before anyone discovered her body.

She had dedicated her body to science, so there was no funeral, said Mark Elfont.

Theres a pull toward the tragic here perhaps as a way to indict the government, to prove how reckless it was in its pursuit of these teachers.

But to leave you with just those stories would be misleading. Because many of the fired teachers had rich, varied lives in the decades that followed.

Nathan Margoliss wife, Adele, wrote several beloved books on sewing.

John Ehrenrichs dad, Joe, had a long career as a technical writer.

The unions last president, Francis Fritz Jennings, became a lauded historian.

Perhaps the most interesting post-HUAC life belongs to one of the few Black teachers fired, Goldie Watson. In the years after, Watson hosted a radio show for homemakers and owned an apparel store.

She also kept a defiant foot in the political world, and worked her way back into the mainstream. In 1967, Philadelphia Mayor James Tate appointed Watson deputy commissioner of records. Shortly afterward, she became the administrator of a prominent urban revitalization program.

In the early 1970s, her political ascent culminated with an ideological twist. Conservative Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, a persistent foe of political and cultural outsiders, appointed Watson as one of his top deputies.

Its hard to imagine that a Black former Communist would get and take a high-profile job in the Rizzo administration. But professor Nicholas Toloudis thinks Watson saw Rizzo much the same way she saw the Communist Party: a means to an end.

She saw the Communist Party as being a toolbox, said Toloudis. The crowbars and the things in that toolbox were things she would use to pry open the segregated institutions of the United States.

Rizzo was a very different type of toolbox, but one Watson thought she could use in her singular pursuit a pursuit she explained to The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1974:

If youre trying to find out what Im all about its that I decided early on in my life that I was going to use whatever talents I had to help other Black people, Watson said.

Somewhere between the lives of Goldie Watson and Sophie Elfont, youll find the story of the Intille family.

Angelina Intille grew up in South Philadelphia one of 10 children in an immigrant family from Italy. She was also the only one of those 10 to continue her education beyond high school, according to her son, Joe.

The studious Angelina fell in with a mostly Jewish group of kids from the neighborhood. Many of them went on to become teachers, Angelina included. Joe, her son, does not think his mom was an active member of the Communist Party just that she was part of the same crowd.

Joes dad was decidedly not part of that crowd. He was a refinery worker with a tendency to gamble away his paycheck, Joe said. He also physically abused Angelina, according to Joe.

One day in the mid-1940s 1946 or 1947, Joe thinks Angelina gathered up her three boys and moved out while her husband was at work. She moved in with Bessie Stensky, another one of the Philadelphia teachers who ended up testifying before HUAC.

Joe, about 8 years old at the time, suddenly found himself in a world of school-teacher-activists.

The names splashed across the front page of the newspapers in 1953 were the people who helped raise him. People like fired teacher Eleanor Fleet and her husband, Irv a kind of male role model for Joe who got him interested in science and technology.

In February 1954, Angelina Intille and her housemate, Bessie Stensky, were among the second wave of Philadelphia teachers to testify before HUAC during hearings held in Washington. Intille, like the rest of the teachers, had already been suspended from the school district. Later that year, she and the others would permanently lose their jobs.

A single parent, Intille needed work, quickly. She and a few of the other fired teachers found jobs at the Sklar School, which served students with special needs. Another group landed at a progressive independent school in the suburbs called The Miquon School.

Joe, then in high school, made a little extra money working as an exterminator for fired teacher Solomon Haas.

That pattern repeated itself. The fired teachers got jobs together. The kids of fired teachers ended up working for each others parents, hanging out, or even, on one occasion, going to prom together.

HUAC hadnt blown them apart.

It bonded them, said Joe Intille.

Even though the union was in various states of decay, as a network of people, it remained intact well after the Supreme Court ruled against Herman Beilan in 1958.

To have a group like that 50 people, said Joe Intille. Whoever heard of such a thing?

As the next decade dawned, the groups legal luck began to turn.

Angelina Intille, Goldie Watson, and two other teachers had already launched a separate challenge based on the fact that their firings had come in a slightly different order than Beilans.

In 1960, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in their favor and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. Angelina was free to teach again. And she did just that.

Seven years later, in 1967, the high court took up a case about a group of state university professors in New York who were fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. This time, the court reversed the precedent it had established in the early days of the Red Scare all the way back in 1952.

Invoking the concept of academic freedom, the majority said the Constitution did protect teachers like the ones fired in Philadelphia.

It was close. A 5-4 decision. But it meant the saga was over.

A few months later, a tiny article ran on page 17 of The Philadelphia Inquirer: Schools Rehire 4 Who Balked at Red Probe

Most of the teachers had moved on. But a handful applied for reinstatement and went back to work nearly 14 years after theyd been suspended

One of them was Judy Gandys father, Herman Beilan.

Why did he return to the school district that had so publicly fired him? Judy figures money was probably a factor. But her dad also loved teaching.

He was completely committed to teaching. Even when he was not in the classroom, said Judy Gandy. He would teach me at home.

Herman Beilan was in his late 50s by the time he resumed his public school teaching career.

Gandy remembers he would take the city bus to work every morning. And he would bring the newspaper along with him, folded up in quarters so that he could read without taking up too much room or inconveniencing the other riders.

He was trying to occupy his brain, which is kind of standard for him, said Gandy.

Herman Beilan and his friends were fired on the front page of the paper and rehired on page 17.

The world had moved on. In some ways, thats probably why they were re-hired.

By the late 1960s, there were new fronts in the culture war. As time passed, those fronts moved further and further from people like Herman Beilan.

When Beilan died in 1981, the Inquirer ran an obituary on page 31. It didnt mention his firing or the Supreme Court case that bears his name.

Angelina Intille also finished her career as a teacher in Philadelphias public schools. But just because she ended up back where she started, doesnt mean the family came through unscathed.

Her son, Joe, ended up in the Navy stationed, of all places, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where his assignments had a distinctly anti-Communist flavor. When he became a civilian, Joe worked as a technical writer. In the mid-1960s, he says he took a job that required a security clearance which the government then denied him because of his moms past.

The clearance denial cost Joe his job, and he ended up selling insurance for a couple of years to stay afloat. Finally, Joe says a government panel in D.C. agreed to review his case.

Theyre sitting up on this counter up there and Im sitting down on the chair and theyre grilling me about my mother and myself, Joe recalled. Why should I get a clearance?

To get his career back, he made a promise to the U.S. government.

I had to promise them that I would not associate with my mother, Joe said.

Joes older brother joined the Air Force and ended up with the same dilemma needing a security clearance to secure a promotion. For Joes brother, it was a breaking point.

It left a very bad taste in my brothers mouth about my mom, said Joe. He basically held it against my mom and never forgave her.

Even though Joe suffered the same consequences, he felt the opposite.

Im not ashamed of any of this, as a matter of fact, I brag about it because I was proud of my mom, said Joe. She stood by her principles.

As for that promise he made to the government about cutting his mom out of his life? He never intended to keep it.

No. No, Joe said. My mothers my best friend.

Angelina eventually remarried, retired, and moved to Florida.

She died in 2004.

Following a generational trend, many of the teachers retired to South Florida. But in their case, it was more than mere coincidence.

All of them all moved up to Lake Worth and they all moved into the same condo complex, said Joe. It was about 20 people.

The Pine Ridge Condominium Complexes sit just southwest of Palm Beach, a sprawling patchwork of two-story buildings and man-made ponds. Pine Ridge doesnt sound like the type of place where youd find a group of accused Communists from Philadelphia. But in the 1980s and 1990s, you could do just that.

Alan Soler the son of two fired teachers, William and Esther remembers visiting his parents and chuckling to himself as they sat around the pool with their friends reminiscing about the glory days of Communism. With near unanimity, the descendants of the fired teachers say their parents and grandparents remained dedicated to left-wing causes and ideology their entire lives.

Alan found the poolside chatter amusing and a bit hypocritical, given the material pleasures of a South Florida condo complex.

But its also a telling image.

Three or four decades after the government called them a threat to the nation, here they were, lounging in the Florida sun.

Theyd made it through. And theyd made it through together.

See the rest here:
Schooled: Revisiting the Philly school system's Communist purge - WHYY