Morris Schappes Quotes

Our schools are being attacked. I hope that changed tempers and changed atmospheres, changes which, perhaps, we had little to do with, will have some bearing. There was a time when the President of our country rebuked the Dies committee for what he called its "sordid procedure." There was a time when the President of the Board of Higher Education rebuked the Dies committee for its attacks on the College. I hope the times are becoming favorable for similar truthful and courageous observations of opinion on the functioning of the Rapp-Coudert committee

the capitalist press boiling everything in the timely caldrons of hysteria

Anti-Semitism has become a major issue for the American people, and for all democratic mankind. In the pattern of imperialist reaction, anti-Semitism today looms ever larger, not only alongside of anti-Communism, anti-Sovietism, anti-unionism, anti-alienism, and anti-Negroism, but in a kind of special relationship to these other elements: Negroes, aliens, union men, the Soviets, and Communists are all in some degree tarred by reaction as Jewish or as the dupes of the Jews. Every reactionary movement today is itself anti-Semitic, or is allied with anti-Semites; on the other hand, the more consistent a progressive movement is, the more it makes the fight against anti-Semitism a prominent part of its program of action. No anti-Semite can be in any sense progressive now; no progressive can for any reason compromise with anti-Semitism.

I wish your Honor or deputies of your Honor could have gone into the college halls and gotten some of the men, some of the men who are not in any way connected with this particular situation, gotten them to describe the atmosphere now. It is what it was in 1928, where, in the faculty dining room, intelligent men did not discuss intelligent things, because they did not dare, your Honor. They discussed road maps, roads, the weather, because there was no confidence that if they discussed more serious things, whether they should be Democrats or Republicans for instance, that it might not redound to their academic disadvantage. In more recent years, the faculty, as a whole, has faced its own problems more courageously. It has given freer rein to its ability, to its intellectual curiosity, expressed its conviction. Now a pall, an intellectual pall, is settling upon the college. People do not want to be seen speaking to other people, although they are personal friends, for fear that somebody will say, "Well, so and so doesn't talk to the right people about the right things." That is not an atmosphere in which a college can flourish. My sympathy goes out to the students who have to sit before teachers who will be afraid to answer questions that will be put to them-because the students will put questions and the teachers will be afraid to answer them, not often because they do not know the answers, but because they do. Is that an atmosphere in which a college-the largest municipally supported college in the world-can such a college flourish in such an atmosphere?

To lead for the common good is to undermine the effectiveness of anti-Semitic propaganda.

Εducation is a war industry. Teachers, especially those involved in higher education, produce a direct war material. Our product is not the cannon, or the shell, or the dive bomber, or the dreadnaught. Ours is the even more basic material-the target. Without the target, the soldier on land, sea, or air, no war could get to the shooting stage.

I studied the students' problems; I did not try to suggest solutions; I tried only to have them develop courage and confidence in the fact that our people, who have solved so many problems, can solve this one, too.

An active conscience is a formidable thing.

Words must be backed by deeds.

As Marxists, we stress the need of bringing the mask for privilege and the mask for frustration into their proper relationship. In this way the ruling class can be shown to be exploiting those it frustrates by diverting their resentment onto a scapegoat who is innocent of frustrating them and whose sacrificial slaughter, therefore, cannot release them from their frustration.

From the founding of our nation there has been a continual, many-angled struggle between these who would sacrifice the public need to their private wills and fortunes, and those who have fought to extend the boundaries of the public interest.

Such students and such teachers are obviously to be regarded as a menace to reaction and its domestic and foreign policy. They have no great enthusiasm for the war. Too many of them have the habit of thinking independently, of acting in concert, of valuing democracy as a way of living rather than as a way of talking. They are organized. Any fascist, any open-shop saboteur of democracy, any labor spy could write a plan of attack for reaction, given this situation. Red-bait. Attack the union as Red-dominated. Use a few "liberals" to lend respectability to the smear. Gag the students by preventing them from hearing speakers of their own choice. Fire some of the most active teachers and trade unionists. Scare the rest. If they don't scare that easily, pin a criminal charge on one of them; if the others still don't scare, at least the charge will shake off the fence onto the side of reaction some who still stubbornly said the issue was academic freedom. These are the tactics, these are the slogans, this is the reasoning laid bare-of growing American fascism trying to coordinate its free school system.

The finance-capitalists who dominate American life are not Jews (Morgan, Rockefeller, DuPonts, Ford, etc.), and the number of Jewish proletarians has vastly increased. Yet, despite these facts, anti-Semitism has taken root in this country, and is now being organized on a greater scale than ever before. This organized anti-Semitism, furthermore, is more and more openly being used as a siphon to divert what are essentially anti-capitalist feelings among the people into channels that will serve only to fasten the hold of capitalism upon them, and capitalism, at that, in its most rabid, its fascist, form. The way to wipe out anti-Semitism coincides in large part, therefore, with the way to eliminate economic exploitation. And the way to wipe out the organized anti-Semitism that the American fascist forces are now fostering coincides with the way to check and crush fascism. Only socialism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, can eliminate the roots of anti-Semitism. And only the people's front, based on the trade unions and uniting the oppressed middle classes of city and country, can crush the fascists' attempt to organize anti-Semitism along lines of violence and vigilanteism. It is, therefore, very encouraging to note that practically all of the contributors to this symposium agree on these propositions: that anti-Semitism has economic roots, and can be uprooted only by some form of socialism; and that anti-Semitism now is a phase of fascism and must be fought as such, through unity with all progressive forces. It is noteworthy that all agree that the time has come to fight anti-Semitism, and considerable scorn is directed against those who preach passivity as a way of mollifying the anti-Semites.

the war makers have tried for more than a year to persuade the American people and the American college student to become enthusiastic targets in the war, and, having failed, must now resort to extraordinary methods of intimidation and terror.

the entire commercial press of our nation is not the "free" press it loudly claims to be that it is, rather, the principal means yet devised by the owners of the giant newspaper industry for dominating the public mind.