Growing Up in America: Freshman English

In the Fall of 1953 I found myself in Boulder, Colorado in a small accelerated Freshman English class with an introverted, gentle-mannered English scholar as my teacher...I don`t even remember his name, Dr something or other...this was during the time when Senator McCarthy from Wisconsin was rooting out all the commie, un-American Americans in America...the Senator manfested in Boulder that Fall in the persona of an ex-CU football great and owner of the Sink, a student 3.2 beer hall on the Hill...he was one hell of a big guy too!.... he`d regularly write vitriolic letters-to-the-editor of the Boulder newspaper attacking my prof as a commie scumbag, demanding that he be fired as he was unfit to teach English at CU ...
	...back in the classroom it was an uneasy time for all of us...as the weeks passed you could tangibly see and feel our prof`s level of stress&anxiety increase as the public demands for his removal became louder...our class became a forum on the topic of freedom of speech and free association in a democratic society...all assigned essays, readings and class discussions were directly related to this topic, e.g. "`What does free speech mean to you`, 1000 words, due on
Monday"...the early 50`s was a time of great anxiety at American universities, a time when profs and others[e.g. Hollywood writers] around the country were being hounded out of their jobs by anti-commie zealots for some past, present or imagined association with left-wing political groups, their lives in many cases ruined... in the late Fall there was a campus-wide meeting to look at this situation...at one point my prof was addressing the meeting when the ex-football hero arose from audience, loudly addressing the large audience, finger pointing at my prof while saying things like, "are you going to listen to this communist?", "are you going to let this red scum talk?", pretty much dominating the meeting and drowning out my teacher whenever he would try to say something...the audience response was mixed but there were no vocal defenders of my prof, who by this time was drenched in sweat and quite shaken...fearful of speaking up, feeling impotent and disgusted with myself, I fled ...the next class and for the rest of the semester a very nervous female grad student was our teacher... when she`d write at the blackboard, you couldn`t help noticing that her blouses were always wet under her armpits...as for our prof, he just kinda disappeared, no one seemed to know for sure what had happened to him, the secretaries in the English department were remote, nothing in the local newspapers and I never saw or heard anything about him again... this was my first encounter with our true&tried American way of dealing with our citizens, whose views, values or lifestyle go against the social grain of the day or are perceived to be antithetical to mainstream conceptions of morality: demonize them until they are a hated, ostracized minority, then deny them employment, e.g. the War On Pot, leading to mandatory drug testing as a requirement for most jobs these days ...