Teachers' Union

The Teachers' Union was a labor organization to which J. Robert Oppenheimer belonged in Berkeley and whose members included university teachers targeted in New York’s anti-Communist campaign. The book presents it less through a formal account of its structure than through the people and controversies surrounding it: concern for underpaid teaching assistants, political activity among academics, and a public defense of teachers’ right to speak and organize.

Berkeley affiliation and campus concerns

Oppenheimer’s connection to the Teachers' Union emerged in campus politics. In one encounter, David Hawkins met him at a union meeting where they discussed the plight of underpaid teaching assistants. Hawkins remembered Oppenheimer as an eloquent and attentive speaker, able to draw together different contributions and make listeners recognize their common ground. The union thus appears as a place where practical labor concerns brought academics into political discussion.

Hawkins’s account places such activity within a wider left-wing current among university intellectuals. He described academics’ aim as pulling the New Deal to the left, while noting that affiliation with the Communist Party had to be concealed because members feared losing their jobs. The union itself is not identified as a Communist organization; rather, its setting overlapped with the political and labor concerns that animated some of its members and associates.

New York dismissals and civil liberties

In 1941, New York State Senator F. R. Coudert, Jr., used a legislative investigation of the public educational system to pursue alleged subversives at the city’s public universities. By September, City College had dismissed twenty-eight staff members; some belonged to the New York branch of the Teachers' Union. The dismissals brought the union into a larger dispute over whether political belief and association could be used to expel educators from public institutions.

The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom condemned the dismissals. When Coudert accused the committee of Communist ties and a New York Times editorial supported his attack, Oppenheimer sent the senator a protest on October 13. He argued that the Bill of Rights protected not only radical beliefs but their expression in speech and writing, including anonymous publication. His letter defended the practices for which the teachers had been targeted and ended by accusing Coudert’s committee of intimidation and arrogance. The account does not describe this as an official action by the Teachers' Union: the union’s members were among those dismissed, while the committee issued the statement and Oppenheimer wrote the protest.

Oppenheimer’s withdrawal and the union’s significance

That autumn, Oppenheimer also brought his own union activity to a close. After attending a meeting in Schenectady concerning atomic-energy work, he wrote to Ernest Lawrence that he would have no further difficulties with the union. The account therefore distinguishes his retreat from organizing from his continued willingness to defend the civil liberties of teachers associated with the union: his union activities had ended, but his October protest against the New York purge remained a forceful public intervention.

The Teachers' Union’s role in the narrative is consequently modest but consequential. It connects workplace grievances at Berkeley with the vulnerability of educators elsewhere, and it makes visible the cost of political association in an academic profession where, Hawkins recalled, a person could engage in left-wing activity but could not safely declare Communist Party membership. Through the union’s members and Oppenheimer’s response to their dismissals, labor organization becomes a concrete test of the boundary between political belief and protected expression.