Rapp-Coudert Inquiry

RAPP-COUDERT INQUIRY. Significant as a rehearsal for McCarthyism, the anticommunist Rapp-Coudert inquiry and purge of 1940–1941 was undertaken by the New York State Legislature at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This was not a period when significant numbers abandoned the American Communist Party but rather when alliances between liberals and Communists weakened, leaving Communists vulnerable to attack by several branches of the governmental apparatus. The target of Rapp-Coudert was the New York City schools, reputed to be hotbeds of leftist agitation. The upstate, antimetropolis component of this attack was personally represented by the small-town Genesee County politician Herbert Rapp. The sophisticated New York City component was represented by the well-connected Manhattan lawyer Frederic R. Coudert, Jr. The Coudert thrust prevailed: the schools were investigated and purged, but no assault was made on the school budgets, so that Communists were in effect sacrificial victims for school systems.

The inquiry into Communism at the high school and elementary school levels in New York City was postponed while the municipal colleges—Queens, Hunter, and Brooklyn colleges, and that locus classicus of collegiate radicalism of the 1930s, City College of New York (CCNY)—were slated to be the initial targets of investigation. Faculty and staff informers were found on all campuses, mostly disaffected former Communists, such as Brooklyn College English professor Bernard Grebanier and CCNY history instructor Martin Canning. On the basis of their testimony, the Rapp-Coudert Committee subpoenaed dozens of municipal college faculty members for private and then public hearings, the results of which made front-page news in the New York City dailies.

In a manner that would later become institutionalized in the postwar McCarthy period, the governmental authorities merely identified Communists, leaving the task of disciplining them to their employers—in this case the New York City Board of Higher Education (BHE). In BHE trials, the suspected Communists were charged with “conduct unbecoming a teacher” for hiding their political affiliation, although the BHE made it clear that they would also fire those who admitted Party membership. This happened in the case of CCNY Party leader and English instructor Morris Schappes, who also served a prison term for perjury. At CCNY more than a dozen faculty and staff members were dismissed, while at the other municipal colleges, smaller groups were fired.

The Rapp-Coudert inquiry was abruptly halted when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in mid-1941, but after World War II the purge of Communists picked up where it had left off. During the 1950s several more accused Communists were dismissed or resigned at Brooklyn College, while the Feinberg Law brought high school and elementary school teachers into a similar position.

The Rapp-Coudert Committee left an enduring legacy. Its research became the foundation for many of the McCarthy-era purges. Several committee staff members and friendly witnesses, such as Robert Morris and Martin Canning, resurfaced in later federal anticommunist investigating committees, and the precedent of Rapp-Coudert became part of the American anticommunist tradition. In the early 1980s the municipal colleges formally apologized to the surviving dismissed teachers and staff members but offered no financial remuneration for the careers blighted by the Rapp-Coudert purge.

Guide to the Investigative Files of the Rapp Coudert Committee, New York State Legislature, 1919-1953 TAM 533. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_533/

Chamberlain, Lawrence H. Loyalty and Legislative Action. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1951.

Gettleman, Marvin E. “Anti-Communist Purges on Campus.” In These Times, 10–16 March 1982.

Iversen, Robert W. Communists and the Schools. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959.

Leberstein, Stephen. "Purging the Profs: The Rapp Coudert Committee in New York, 1940-1942," in Michael E. Brown et al. (eds.), New Studies in the Politics and Culture of US Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993; pp. 91–122.

Schrecker, Ellen W. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.