In the late 1990s, this writer took a position teaching history, government, and economics in a New York City public high school. After only two weeks, word circulated that I was a born-again evangelical and politically conservative. One of the senior teachers called me aside and, without any prior argument, said, "Communism is over in the Soviet Union, but it's alive and well at this high school." Shortly after that "welcome," it became apparent that many of the U.S. history teachers were hardcore communists. (This is decades before so-called "wokism.")
Howard Zinn's best-selling communist textbook was not included on the list of high school textbooks because it was a college textbook, but nevertheless, this cell of commies would regularly copy pages out of Zinn's book, A Peoples' History of the United States, for distribution to the U.S. History students.
The commie hostility toward people of faith was also manifested in that department. The thought that people of faith and people who don't believe can co-exist is alien to Marxists, for whom "religion is the opiate of the people." The left feels threatened by the First Amendment, which leftists believe unduly encourages people to believe in God and thereby takes away from a more realistic assessment of life where one is able to see the class struggle as our top social and political priority. On one occasion, a young female teacher began moving around in front of me in the teachers' office, taunting me by singing, "I don't have a soul, I don't have a soul." Another older left-winger called to me from across the teachers' office, "Tell me Mr. Ludwig, is God a he or a she?"
At another point in time, I was saying to another leftist colleague that if we promote a particular political ideology in the classroom, we are advancing our bias, not actually teaching. He replied that "everyone has a bias, so it is better to acknowledge our bias and defend it openly rather than pretend to be more objective." "But is it not a teacher's duty to be as impartial as possible in order to communicate with and for all the students?" this writer asked, adding, "There are a range of personalities and viewpoints in our classes." To this, the communist colleague replied, "So what?"
At one point, that same teacher who had welcomed me with his poisonous comment about the USSR spent an entire month in his teaching of AP European History explaining and extolling the virtues of the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A group of students complained to the chairlady of the department, but she did nothing. Another member of the cell regularly distributed to students free copies of the newspapers of the Progressive Labor Party. A third member of the cell became the faculty adviser to the Gay and Straight Alliance. A fourth member advised a left-wing student political club.In the late 1990s, there were a variety of textbooks so individual teachers could choose to use their preference when teaching. Each of these were written by either one or two authors and attempted to be balanced. Although some were clearly more "liberal" than others, this writer was able to find one or two that were coherent, informed, and relatively balanced and presented America as a unified culture, not as a hodgepodge of grievances, conflicts, and unresolved hostilities. However, after only a few years passed, a single U.S. history text was bought for all teachers to use entitled The Americans. This 1,000-plus-page textbook was written by so-called scholars, but they were all from sub-specialties of U.S. history. One specialized in geography, another was from ethnic studies, another had written many text prep books, the fourth was an African studies professor, and the fifth specialized in women's history and was the only woman of the group (surprise!). In addition, there was a long list of "contributors." Thus, clearly, this was a textbook-by-committee production coordinated and managed by Holt McDougal, publisher of the volume.
It seemed that the book covered every protest march and strike that ever happened in the United States, yet there was almost no reference to the impact of Christianity on our country either during the colonial period or during more recent centuries since the creation of our Constitution. Thus, we have a picture of the country as a divided or balkanized mess. The sense of and picture of a nation with unifying themes, such as Frederick Jackson Turner seeing westward expansion as defining our growth, are entirely missing.
What about innovation? Love of nature? Transition from agriculture to manufacturing? What about the life-and-death struggle to assure that there could not be slaves in a country founded to promote liberty and rights? What about the integration of large and diverse immigrant groups despite some resistance? While The Americans does not lift up Karl Marx or commies like William Z. Foster, it does fail to call Albert Rosenberg, who sold the secrets of the atomic bomb to the USSR, a traitor. There is no treatment of the use of the term "progressive" by today's communists in order to connect their re-ordering of today's society with the icons of American history Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican and independent) or Woodrow Wilson. Although those presidents had some socialist themes insofar as they supported unduly expanding the power of the federal government, they still were not as firmly united with today's communists as are the present leaders of today's Democrat party.
Remember that Pres. Harry Truman distanced himself from Henry Wallace, who was too sympathetic with Josef Stalin and the communists and ran for president against Truman on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. Today's Democrats have not similarly distanced themselves from the Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Instead, the Biden people came out with a joint statement with Sanders in 2020 that was 110 poorly written pages before coming out with the Democrat party platform. The Democrat party platform, when subsequently published, although only 90 pages, was totally in sync with the earlier signed agreement. Sanders, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, is neither a Democrat of the Truman or Kennedy variety nor a socialist. He always finds a way to justify the communist countries because he adheres to that philosophy.
What today's political pundits are calling woke (or some form of communism) has been on the march for decades. It was alive and well in the late 1990s and had already been in place for decades. It has gone mainstream in recent years and openly is embraced by many who were more careful not to be seen as sympathetic to Marxist ideology. It is anti-God at its core, and it clearly wants government to take over the means of production. The radical hope is to dignify the move toward undermining our republic, natural rights, private property, and the family by painting the words "anti-racism" and "gender equality" on the hammer and sickle. Then talk about electric cars and reducing carbon footprints, and hope the fear generated will change our society forever.
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