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I made an appointment to talk to Dan Fein, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Mayor of Houston. In addition to pursuing revolutionary studies, I was also taking a speech class at U of H and I needed someone to record and study, so I settled on Dan Fein. In our first interview, I found out that he and his party disliked Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union more, than I did. Fein was leading SWP's effort to stop the Vietnam War, and stopping that war was replacing educational reform in my list of priorities, too.
It's interesting that there were three main but very separate branches of the anti-war movement:
The SWP position was "Out Now," which eventually prevailed. Whether the history books admit it or not, they were a powerful force in the anti-war movement.
I listened to Dan Fein’s speeches. I took notes and wrote criticisms for my speech class. We became friends. And I enrolled in the SWP class. It was based on what I had just read, but didn't understand: “State and Revolution.”
I think that SWP accepted me as a member about six months after I asked to join, around October 1973. Meantime, I went to their classes, hung around with Dan Fein, and attended their public events. Their leading person, they called him “the organizer,” told me that it was unusual for them to recruit directly into their party. Nearly all their members, he said, had joined at an early age through the Young Socialist Alliance. Nearly all of them had joined during the Vietnam War. A few, like the organizer himself, had joined during the civil rights movement before the Vietnam War. Only a few of their fifty members had joined before that, and most of those had recently joined a faction that was clearly on their way out of the SWP. They’d never had a new member come primarily from the tiny movement for educational reform, so they weren’t sure what to do with me.
As soon as they were sure that I wasn’t going to join the new faction, that I would be loyal to the main group, they posed me for membership and I was voted in. I was 33 years old while nearly all of them were in their early 20s. Almost immediately, SWP put me in charge of raising money for their lawsuit against the Nixon Administration. I guess the main reason was because I already knew nearly all the liberals in Houston and didn’t mind asking them for money, since I’d been steadily begging for Lille Skole for years.
"They'll nail anyone who ever scratched his ass during the National Anthem." --Actor Humphrey Bogart, Speaking of the House Un-American Activities Committee
Most of my old friends around Houston dropped me immediately after I started asking them to help and/or join the SWP. One of my best friends from graduate school stopped talking to me altogether. That kind of hurt.
I finished my dissertation before it got to be a big problem at the university. Then I had to review my options. I was, at that time, a theoretical expert in school administration. I had clinched a doctorate and a Texas Superintendent’s License. The obvious next career move for me was to take on a school principal’s job, then start moving up to superintendent.
But school principals are bosses. If teachers were to go on strike, I’d have had to oppose them because I’d be their boss. The organizer explained to me that I could never take sides against the workers, so I couldn’t start up the career ladder in education. One might think that I would consider that a big loss, as I had more than 300 hours of college education behind me, a big investment.
Before I joined the SWP, I was well known in educational and academic circles. TV & newspaper reporters called on me to talk about progressive education. My joining led to the immediate and total sacrifice of whatever intellectual respect I had enjoyed.
But I didn’t mind much. By then, I had a much better idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to make social change. I wanted to help create a world where nobody abused children. Climbing a career ladder wasn’t an interest, especially not if it contradicted my main goal.
I took a job as a 7th grade teacher in Houston’s 3rd ward. Fortunately for me, I was officially ABD “All But Dissertation” when I lined up the job. They wouldn’t have hired me with the advanced degree. By the time school started in September, though, I had my diploma. I ran for Building Rep for the teachers’ union, and I won. I signed up every teacher in the school. As I was an outspoken and very public socialist, the school administration really hated me.
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