“When I was a child, I spoke as a child; I felt as a child; I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away the things of a child.” So said Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 13:11).
When Sally Chirlin was a Child (her maiden name) she also thought as one. Among her thoughts in high school was starting a young communist league. The results were rather harsh. She was expelled from school.
There she is in the photo, reenacting for me that pivotal moment as she left the front door of what was the Norwich high school in spring of 1953. Students did not normally use this door. Apparently it was reserved for solemn occasions.
I mentioned in one of my Souvenirs columns that I wanted to learn what it was like to grow up in such a small town like Norwich. Sally responded. I patiently listened to several of her escapades, but when she brought up getting kicked out of school, my attention piqued.
Communism is generally viewed today as a defunct form of social organization. It failed miserably when pitted against capitalism. Basically, communism tried to share common wealth whereas capitalism encourages most of the wealth to gravitate to those who place their capital at greatest risk in an intensely competitive free market.
Political involvement tarnished the altruistic aims of both ideologies and the adversarial confrontation became communism versus democracy. Polarization fueled itself with the incorporation of good and evil, theism versus atheism, truth versus lies, and the Cold War.
Today we may wonder what all the fuss was about. But to those of us who lived through all this stuff, it was serious business. After World War II ended in 1945, communism seemed to many of us as the next evil sequel to nazism. The Cold War (1945 to 1989) was a global extension of World War II. The Korean War (1950 to 1953) was a localized hot spot. The short synopsis is that being a communist was tantamount to being an enemy of the United States. To emphasize the dire nature of the adverse confrontation, the mighty Soviet Union was about to H-bomb us into oblivion, and of course, we likewise them.
Learning about communism was outright dangerous because your career could easily be destroyed by anyone who called you a communist. The appropriate evasive action during this sad era was to keep clean by not even being remotely associated with anything that even resembled communism. This anti-intellectual climate was puzzling to many of us because an ancient axiom of warfare is “know thy enemy.”
Only authorized, official persons were allowed to study communism. In this land of the free, ordinary citizens were smart to avoid it. The result was predictable. Reading about and discussing communism became a popular celebrated cause for students. Reading the basic books of this ideology (Marx, Engels, Lenin) was tediously arduous but probably contributed to the overall literacy of many students, including yours truly. It was a form of rebellion that was intellectually stimulating and far healthier than other contemporary forms of rebellion, such as smoking, drinking, doping, or asinine driving.
Healthier, that is, unless one got caught. Sally’s mistake was not merely studying communism but writing a note about starting up a young communist league to study it. She intended it more as a prank than a scholarly pursuit. Unfortunately, it was perceived then as the equivalent of someone starting up a terrorist cell today. Her note made it to the principal.
When Sally first told me about this episode, I laughed. Then later that evening I was haunted by the memories of my platoon sergeant yelling at us that the only good commie was a dead commie and that our job was to slaughter as many of those #$@&*! gooks as possible. Not funny anymore.
Truth is the first casualty of war and the search for it can be just as calamitous. Today we are engaged in another polarized conflict with global ramifications, the battle between civilization and terrorism. Unfortunately, it is being cast as a religious war between Christianity and Islam, the “Cross and the Crescent”, the History Channel calls it. No humor here either.
The principal told Sally’s father that the school did not believe that Sally had a communist cell in the Norwich high school, “but, these days you can’t be too careful.” Sally remembers his exact statement to her father, “Dick, we just can’t keep your daughter busy enough.” Well, Sally was readmitted and she sure seems busy enough today. The principal apparently handled the situation appropriately. And so did Sally.