 Next, we are going to have, to round out our educational perspective, we are going to have a taped testimony. It's quite wonderful from Marcy Winograd on the Cold War in the U.S. classroom. Marcy Winograd is the coordinator of Code Pink Congress and former congressional peace candidate. You can join her and co-host Medea Benjamin and Hanai Jodabberans each Tuesday night at 5 p.m. Pacific time for a Code Pink Congress Zoom on demilitarization and U.S. foreign policy. I'm Marcy Winograd and I want to thank Rachel Brunke and Frank Dorrell for this fantastic Cold War Truth Commission, a comprehensive look at the Cold War, what we inherited during that time. And as a teacher with the, or retired teacher at the Los Angeles Unified School District, I'll be focusing on what it was like growing up as a student during the Cold War, as well as the red-baiting of teachers throughout the country. I was born in 1953, this was several years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of days. 1953, the year I was born was also the year the CIA overthrew Mossadeq in Iran following his nationalization of the oil industry. So while I was growing up in my New York City apartment building towers out of blocks, Mossadeq was sitting in a prison cell in Iran for three years. After that he was transferred and placed under house arrest at his home where he died quietly to avoid a political uprising over U.S. criminality in Iran. In 1957 when I was four years old, the CIA, excuse me, not the CIA, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite Sputnik into space. People here were like, how could this be? How could the Soviets have beaten us into space? This is terrible. We must crank up our science education and that's what happened. Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which increased funding for education at all levels, particularly science, and they included low interest loans for college students, obviously not low enough, for students who went into science and technology. This focus on science and technology continues to this day as we see the proliferation of STEM programs in our high schools and colleges, STEM standing for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. These programs are basically incubators for the military industrial complex. They groom students for jobs in weapons production and surveillance and there is pushback on college campuses as well as at Code Pink where I volunteered Code Pink Congress. Let's flash back to 1962. This is when the Soviets in response to U.S. attempts to overthrow Castro in Cuba in the Bay of Pigs installed nuclear missiles in Cuba 90 miles off the coast of Florida. It was a tense 13 days. I was nine years old. I remember this, rushing off to the grocery store and at this point in the San Fernando Valley with my mother to stock up. We were frantically up and down, you know, running up and down the aisles, putting canned goods and other items in our grocery basket thinking that we needed to hunker down to survive, to endure a nuclear catastrophe. Now we know that this is crazy, right? But this is what we're doing then. We did not have a bomb shelter. So I'm not sure where we were going to hunker down or why people thought bomb shelters would protect them from radioactive fallout. But a lot of people were building bomb shelters in Los Angeles and throughout the country. The president was telling us, build a bomb shelter. It will protect you. And people were hoarding food to put in these shelters. They didn't want people showing up in the middle of the night asking to stay with them more for a bite to eat because the grocery stores were empty. Years later, we recognized these fallout shelters were absurd and a global nuclear disarmament movement followed and people looked at these fallout shelters and said, what are we going to do with these? And they became wine cellars or just storage spaces. By this time, by the 60s, Los Angeles had become the largest military aerospace complex in the world with companies like Lockheed and Hughes and McDonnell Douglas profiting off the arms race. In school, we practiced duck and cover drills, our teacher would say. Drop! And we would drop and duck under our desks. All of us collectively in the classroom. I remember this and we would put our hands over our head, over our neck thinking this was going to somehow shield us from radioactive fallout. I can still hear the song, the duck and cover song. I'm not going to sing so much of a voice. But together with the song, we saw a little video with Bertha Turtle who in an effort to get away from this evil looking monkey who was dangling a lit firecracker, maybe supposed to be symbolic of a nuclear weapon, Bert would climb back into his shell and that's what we were doing. We were climbing under our desks, ducking and covering. In the seventh grade, 1965, during the Vietnam War, my social studies teacher, who I revered, used to periodically pause in the middle of the lesson about the 13 colonies, a lesson that never included anything about the racism inherent in colonization or the pernicious effects of genocide. He would pause his lesson and he would take his yardstick and he would walk over to the wall where he had a giant map of Southeast Asia and he would say, this is where Vietnam is and this is where we must win. We must win the Vietnam War because if we do not, then communists will creep up on our beaches in Santa Monica, they will invade our living rooms, the whole world will become a totalitarian, dystopian nightmare ruled by autocrats and truthfully I believed him. I didn't know much about the Vietnam War and it wasn't until later, you know, when I was in high school and my father screamed sense into my sister's boyfriend who wanted to enlist to go to Vietnam and fight that I realized that my history teacher was all wrong and that propelled me into the anti-war movement and I participated in moratoriums at UCLA, I marched in San Francisco and by and large my adult life has been a commitment to the anti-war movement. So getting back to my seventh grade class and the domino theory, the theory that he was espousing was that if one country went communist, all of the surrounding regional countries would go communist thinking that it was monolithic and it had nothing to do with class struggle or revolutions about social injustice. No, that was not part of the thinking, at least not in that classroom. As a teacher applying for a job in 1993 with the Los Angeles Unified School District, I remember being taken aback because I was asked to sign a loyalty oath, something to the effect of I am not a communist and I have no intention of overthrowing the US government. I signed. All of us were expected to sign this if we didn't, we didn't get a job. These loyalty oaths, when did this pop up? During the Cold War, this was a pet project of the American Legion together with the daughters of the American Revolution and the chambers of commerce. They were pushing legislation across the country to adopt loyalty oaths state by state. They were also promoting curriculum and supporting anti-communist or communist hunting newspaper publishers like William Randolph First, who was intent on weeding out the communist teachers in our academic institutions. During the Cold War, hundreds of teachers lost their jobs. They were forced out of teaching because they refused to testify before congressional committees, before HUAC, to name names about other teachers who might have been involved in organizing efforts. And where was the teachers union in all of this? Well, the AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, took a principle policy position in opposition, public opposition to these loyalty oaths and in opposition to requiring teachers to testify before these red-baiting committees. There is controversy over how committed to this position the teachers union was at the time, how strong it was. And others have pointed out that it was the ACLU that really fought to protect teachers who were accused of membership in the Communist Party. In addition to these loyalty oaths, as I briefly mentioned, the American Legion also pushed a curriculum which was adopted by some districts, but plenty of others rejected it. It included accepted literature, unaccepted literature, and also a mandate that was widely accepted. And that mandate was that if you were teaching in the United States in a public school, you better put up an American flag in your classroom and you had better have your students recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. And by and large, to this day, if you walk into a classroom in the United States, you will hear students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, unless you happen to walk into a classroom like one that another person, somebody very close to me, taught in, where no one was expected to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or to believe in nationalism. Thank you so much for your time today. And I know others want to share their views on the Cold War. And I appreciate everything that the organizers of this event are doing to bring out the truth and to fight the next Cold War. Thank you. Go Marcy! Definitely in the record. Frank? Thanks, Marcy. Thanks, Rachel.