“A War of Ideas”: The Rise of Conservative Teachers in Wartime New York City, 1938–1946

On the evening of May 17, 1946, more than 1,200 festive supporters streamed into the Brooklyn Academy of Music to honor a New York City teacher who had survived, by the skin of her teeth, charges of “un-American” teaching. Since 1935, New York City's public school teachers faced the threat of investigation and dismissal for potentially subversive radical political beliefs or affiliations. Tonight, however, the audience breathed a collective sigh of relief that the Board of Education hearing had turned out well and that the teacher in question would retain her position.