Hardy, Jack

HARDY, JACK (1901-1993?). Named Dale Zysman at birth, “Jack Hardy” was a leading labor activist of the New York Teachers Union and, under his pseudonym, wrote a handful of easy-to-read texts for adults and children.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Hardy/Zysman first gained fame during the later 1920s as an outstanding football coach at St. Utrecht in Brooklyn. Entering college, he took classes from Scott Nearing, the famed critic of American imperialism. Assisting the prolific Nearing, Hardy/Zysman co-authored The Economic Organization of the Soviet Union, published by Vanguard Press in 1927. By the early 1930s, he had become a teacher in New York’s public schools.

Close to the Communist Party if not perhaps a member, he became highly active in the Teaches Union, eventually a member of its Executive Board. By 1939, he had risen to Chair of the board of the New York City Teachers Union. As Jack Hardy, he wrote some of the first Communist popularizations of radical heroes, such as Francis Wright, for the Pioneer, a leftwing children’s magazine, in the early 1930s. He authored The First American Revolution (1937), a highly romanticized, Popular Front-style treatment for the general reader. He also collaborated on smaller, research-based and popularly written studies on clothing and textile workers in an International Publishers occupation-based series and authored several children’s books.

In 1940, Jack Hardy was named as a Communist by the Martin Dies-led House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. With more than a dozen others, he lost his teaching job. He walked out of the New York State Rapp-Coudert hearings, setting off a small storm of newspaper reportage.

Thereafter, Hardy/Zysman went to work for Labor Research Associates, a group of researchers close to the Left, supported financially by friends of the Communist Party. His years of writing books on popular topics had passed.

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