The president of the United States says New York has “installed a communist” by electing Zohran Mamdani as its mayor. A native New Yorker who moved his residence to Florida, Donald Trump also suggested that Miami could become a refuge for “those fleeing communism in New York City.”
So I’ve got a question for the Sunshine State: will your schools let students discuss whether Mamdami is a communist? And if not, how can you claim to uphold freedom?
Last year, Florida passed a law requiring school instruction about the “evils and dangers of communism.” Then the House of Representatives enacted a bill to provide schools around the country with materials showing that communism is “contrary to the founding principles of freedom and democracy in the United States.”
The bill is now under consideration in the Senate, where Florida Republican Rick Scott made its real purpose clear. “For decades, the left has worked to promote failed socialist and communist ideologies that go against the values we and President Trump are fighting so hard to protect,” Scott declared. Trump’s opponents are spreading radical propaganda, he explained, so schools need to counter that by teaching children “the freedom and principles that define our nation.”
And if that sounds like the Cold War, it should. A nation that truly believed in free thought would never tell every individual what to think.
But that’s precisely what we did, 70 years ago. To fight communist propaganda, schools taught propaganda of their own. And they censored the full and open discussion that democracy demands.
The first step was to make sure teachers were on the right side. After World War II, dozens of states passed measures requiring teachers to take loyalty oaths. In Vermont, teachers had to forswear 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 prevent a teacher from, say, criticizing the repeal of national alcohol prohibition?
Nobody knew, so the safest move was to keep quiet. “School teachers are like the Sphinx,” a Washington Post columnist wrote in 1950. “They seldom express their views.” That was especially true for the Soviet Union and communism, which became tabooed topics in the classroom. Teachers referred to the American Revolution as the War of Independence, lest they conjure communist revolt. And one teacher was reprimanded for telling her class — accurately — that the Soviet Union had a larger land mass than the U.S. did.
The silence around the subject started to lift after the Soviets launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957, which made Americans worry that the enemy’s technical prowess might lure children into its camp. So states began to require school units or courses about communism.
Louisiana’s law mandated instruction about 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 teaching about “the dangers of communism, the ways to fight communism, the evils of communism, the fallacies of communism, and the false doctrines of communism.”
Fast-forward to Florida today, where — under a proposed set of state social studies standards — students will learn that communist governments engaged in “suppression of freedoms” and built a “cult of personality” around their leaders. They will also study how communists “utilize crises (real and manufactured) to rally support for the regime.”
That’s all true, and our students should know it. And it brings us back to Zohran Mamdani, whom Trump and other Republicans have denounced as a communist. There’s no evidence that Mamdami wants to overthrow democratic government and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat, which the Florida standards correctly identify as a distinguishing feature of communism.
But there is evidence that Donald Trump has suppressed freedoms, by deporting student protesters and harassing his political enemies. He has invoked false crises to send troops into American cities and to kill foreign civilians in international waters. And he has built a cult of personality around himself, holding a military parade on his birthday and placing his face on a coin.
I would welcome a full discussion of these matters in American classrooms. But that’s exactly what Trump and his apologists are trying to prevent. In the name of freedom, they are suppressing 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.
