The President of the United States claims that New York “installed a communist” by electing Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Born in New York and moving to Florida, Donald Trump also suggested that Miami could become a refuge for “those fleeing communism in New York.”
So I have a question for the Sunshine State: Will your schools allow students to discuss whether Mamdami is a communist? And otherwise, how can we pretend to defend freedom?
Last year, Florida passed a law requiring school education about the “evils and dangers of communism.” Then the House of Representatives passed a bill to provide schools nationwide with materials demonstrating that communism is “contrary to the founding principles of liberty and democracy in the United States.”
The bill is currently being considered in the Senate, where Florida Republican Rick Scott has made its true goal clear. “For decades, the left has worked to promote failed socialist and communist ideologies that run counter to the values for which we and President Trump fight so hard,” Scott said. Trump’s opponents are spreading radical propaganda, he explained, and so schools must counter that by teaching children “about freedom and the principles that define our nation.”
And if this sounds like the Cold War, it should. A nation that truly believes in free thought will never tell every individual what to think.
But that’s precisely what we did 70 years ago. To combat communist propaganda, schools taught their own propaganda. And they censored the full and open debate that democracy demands.
The first step was to make sure the teachers were on the right side. After World War II, dozens of states passed measures requiring teachers to take loyalty oaths. In Vermont, teachers were required to renounce any “instruction, propaganda, or activity” that was “contrary to or subversive of the Constitution and laws of the United States.” But as one teacher asked, would that stop a teacher, for example, from criticizing the repeal of the national alcohol ban?
No one knew, so the safest thing was to keep quiet. “Teachers are like the Sphinx,” wrote a Washington Post columnist in 1950. “They rarely express their views. » This was especially true for the Soviet Union and communism, which became taboo subjects in the classroom. Teachers referred to the American Revolution as a war of independence, for fear of evoking a communist revolt. And a teacher was reprimanded for telling her class – accurately – that the Soviet Union had a larger land area than the United States.
Silence around the subject began to dissipate after the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957, leading Americans to fear that the enemy’s technical prowess would lure children into its camp. States then began requiring academic units or courses on communism.
The Louisiana law required education on the “evils of socialism” and “the strategy and tactics used by communists in their efforts to achieve their ultimate goal of world domination.” And in 1961, Florida required that every student receive 30 hours of instruction in “the dangers of communism, the means of combating communism, the evils of communism, the errors of communism, and the false doctrines of communism.”
Fast forward to Florida today, where — as part of a set of social studies standards proposed by the state — students will learn that communist governments engaged in the “suppression of freedoms” and built a “cult of personality” around their leaders. They will also study how communists “use crises (real and fabricated) to rally support for the regime.”
This is all true and our students should know it. And that brings us back to Zohran Mamdani, who Trump and other Republicans have denounced as a communist. There is no evidence that Mamdami wants to overthrow democratic government and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat, which Florida Standards correctly identifies as a distinctive feature of communism.
But there is evidence that Donald Trump suppressed freedoms by expelling student protesters and harassing his political enemies. He invoked false crises to send troops into American cities and kill foreign civilians in international waters. And he built a cult of personality around himself, holding a military parade on his birthday and placing his face on a coin.
I would welcome an in-depth discussion of these issues in American classrooms. But that’s exactly what Trump and his supporters are trying to prevent. In the name of freedom, they suppress it. We’ve seen this act before.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
