Teachers of destruction

WRITE OF CENTER

Working in Manhattan in the mid-late 1970s, I had the privilege of making friends with Alice Widener, a syndicated columnist for Barrons, a lecturer and renowned analyst, and publisher of USA Magazine.

Editor and Publisher magazine cited Widener for “an outstanding record for discerning trends and reporting them, is often ahead of others in interpreting developments, gets straight facts and logically and simply presents the ABC’s.”

Almost single- handedly, Widener covered the meetings in the ‘60s and later of what were called the “Socialist Scholars.” She analyzed their plans for destruction of the U.S. democracy and observed the growing arrogance of their techniques and the alarming results.

Widener’s findings go back to 1905. Her writings about the socialist movement among American college and university professors attracted a lot of attention and feedback from students and faculty members.

The epilogue in her book “ Teachers of Destruction” is telling. Penned by J. Edgar Hoover, he said, “I have noted with a great deal of interest your writings ... and hope that you will continue your good work, particularly in alerting the American public to the dangers of the Communist menace.”

Here’s a taste of her book. The similarities to today shouldn’t surprise you. In the aftermath of a 1964 student revolt at U.C. Berkeley, she said a shocked and bewildered public asked about the youthful rioters, “Where did they come from? What kind of background have they.”

In the spring of 1965, after several thousand young people marched in Washington, D.C., protesting the Vietnam war,

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and later in August, when dozens of students and Ivy League professors defied the law, staged a sit-in at the White House and attempted to break through police barricades at the Capitol, again raised the question, “Where did they come from?”

It turned out those protesters were largely from the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. SDS was the offspring of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy that had been working for 65 years, according to Widener’s exhaustive research, “to train young Americans in the Leftist way they should go.” The organization was a re-brand from the Inter-collegiate Socialist Society (ISS).

A key leader in that group was Alexander Trachtenberg of Yale University. He later became head of the Communist publishing house “International Publishers.” The term “industrial democracy” was found in one of Trachtenberg’s writings. He said, “The Russian (Bolshevik) revolution is the heritage of the world. It must not be defeated.”

In 1945, Dr. Harry Overstreet, long- time friend of the League for Industrial Democracy, said he remembered when that organization was just starting with University of California teachers pushing to study socialism. They didn’t want anybody to know they were doing it. The League started the process of getting college people to “think about the things that need to be thought of.”

Those protagonists, Widener said, “exerted tutelage over its progeny ... educating them into thinking about the things socialists deemed necessary ... such as government ownership of the means of production and Marxist production for use and not for profit, and subsidizing students’ activities as they installed a kind of sub rosa socialist light on the American college campus.”

Consider some of the recent well- organized protests we’ve seen on university campuses and in cities.

Chancellor Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt said there was clear coordination and the “playbook” for protests backed by “organized networks” that could have motivated or directed students and agitators to demonstrate and disrupt campus.

Washington University Chancellor Andrew Martin agreed. “Many of the things that happened on our campus, including an attempted encampment, we didn’t allow it to take place and ultimately had folks arrested to shut it down,” Martin said. “Three quarters of those individuals had nothing to do with the university.”

The U. S. House recently passed a resolution denouncing the “horrors of socialism.” Republicans were joined by 86 Democrats voting in favor of the resolution, which was introduced by Florida Republican and first-generation Cuban-American Maria Elvira Salazar. Her parents fled the communist regime of Fidel Castro.

The resolution states “socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule and brutal dictatorships.”

I hope you’re paying attention to all of this.

Art Humphries is a member of the Kendall County Republican Party.