Rapp-Coudert Committee

Its inquiries led to the dismissal of more than 40 instructors and staff members at the City College of New York, actions the committee's critics regarded as a political "witch-hunt."

The abrupt change of the American Communist Party line following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 thrust the role and influence of the roughly 60,000-member organization into the public eye.

Within days after the signing of the political agreement between Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler, and the Soviet Union, headed by Joseph Stalin, American Communists moved as one from vocal public opposition to fascism as part of a broad Popular Front to advocacy of non-intervention in the erupting European conflict, characterizing the fight between Germany and Britain as an "imperialist war" of little import to the American working class.

[6] The choice of the widely respected and high-profile Windels, himself a partisan Republican, was intended to lend instant legitimacy and credibility to the controversial work of the committee.

[10] Legal advice was sought from the city's current corporation counsel, W.C. Chanler, who advised that faculty and staff members refusing to testify before the committee stood in defiance of the Board's policy directive to cooperate and were thus subject to dismissal.

The committee boasted that it had "exposed" 69 instructors as Communists and gathered additional evidence implicating as radicals another 434 members of the faculty and staff of New York City's college system.

[12] In spring 1941, this opinion was given the force of official policy, when the New York Board of Higher Education prohibited membership of teachers and staff in the Communist Party USA.

Faced with the committee's deus ex machina, the accused were at a loss for determining how to resist.By the end of 1942, 19 individuals had been dismissed from City College of New York alone, with another 7 handing in their resignations on their own.

[17] The first serious academic study of the Rapp-Coudert Committee was conducted in the early 1950s by Lawrence Chamberlain, a political centrist who was granted access to the private papers of Frederic R.

[18] Chamberlain held those dismissed in high scholarly esteem:[19] No one can read through the verbatim testimony ... without being impressed with the generally superior character of the group here under scrutiny.

There seems no doubt from evidence presented elsewhere that some of the group were Communists, but the impressive and inescapable fact is that the only evidence presented by either side points to: (1) outstanding scholarship, (2) superior teaching, (3) absence of indoctrination in the classroom.In October 1981, more than four decades after the launch of the Rapp-Coudert Committee, the dismissed employees won a small measure of vindication when the City University Board of Trustees passed a resolution expressing "profound regret at the injustice done to former colleagues on the faculty and staff of the university" who were fired or forced to resign for their political affiliations.