Campus anti-war activists under attack by administrations, police, and fascists. As it was, so it is.

‘Columbia Fires Workers Who Opposed War’ by Melos Most from Socialist Call. Vol. 1 No. 11. June 1, 1935.

NEW YORK. Three technicians employed at the Columbia Medical Center were dismissed; two instructors asked to resign, and ten students subjected to disciplinary action for belonging to the Medical Center’s anti-war committee this week.

Trouble started when a news item appeared in the Columbia College Spectator about anti-war activity at the Center. The dean immediately called in the head of the anti-war committee and demanded that he tell who was responsible for the appearance of the item.

The anti-war group, a section of the University anti-war committee, then decided to assume collective responsibility, and sent in a statement to the Spectator to that effect, over the signatures of ten students, three technicians, and two instructors.

Fired!

The technicians were immediately fired, and the instructors requested to hand in their resignations, which they refused to do.

As we go to press the case of ten students is likewise coming up for disciplinary action.

Defenders of academic liberty Immediately swung into action, and petitions are circulating among the student body and faculty, as the Medical Center is being picketed by indignant students. A demonstration was held in front of the Center, 168 street and Broadway, Tuesday at noon, and others will follow.

Telegrams of protest were sent by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Student League for Industrial Democracy.

Meanwhile anti-war students at Clinton High School were being terrorized by Hearst-inflamed student vigilantes, who assaulted them three times in the past week.

Army Generals

On Tuesday, May 28, while the high school ROTC was being reviewed with usual pomp by two army generals, a counter-demonstration under the auspices of the school chapters of the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the National Student League was attacked by hoodlums in full view of mounted and foot police, who consulted with the attackers and finally rode down on the demonstration and dispersed it while allowing the disruptors to remain.

Students Attacked

Lou Hay, high school director of the Student LID, was the principal speaker.

On Friday and Monday, students distributing leaflets to announce the demonstration were attacked and arrested.

All is not quiet elsewhere on the student front. A demonstration for the reinstatement of the six Hunter College students suspended for anti-war activities will be held Friday, May 31, by the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the NSL.

At 2:30 on the same day there will be a demonstration at City Hall, where the Jacobs Bill to outlaw student radicalism will come up before the Board of Aldermen.

Socialist Call began as a weekly newspaper in New York in early 1935 by supporters of the Socialist Party’s Militant Faction Samuel DeWitt, Herbert Zam, Max Delson, Amicus Most, and Haim Kantorovitch, with others to rival the Old Guard’s ‘New Leader’. The Call Education Institute was also inaugurated as a rival to the right’s Rand School. In 1937, the Call as the Militant voice would fall victim to Party turmoil, becoming a paper of the Socialist Party leading bodies as it moved to Chicago in 1938, to Milwaukee in 1939, where it was renamed “The Call” and back to New York in 1940 where it eventually resumed the “Socialist Call” name and was published until 1954.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/socialist-call/v1n11-jun-01-1935.pdf