The Conference on College Composition and Communication, where I’m hanging out right now, is organized by the National Council of Teachers of English. It’s good to be a part of that organization; John James deBoer, my paternal grandfather, was the 32nd president of the organization. A professor of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he was a lifelong educator and researcher in best practices for literacy education. Today, I have been paging through some of his work and thinking of him through his academic career.

That is the only means I have to think of him. I never met him; he died 12 years before I was born. My father told me, once, that he died from alcoholism. This alcoholism, he strongly believed, was driven in large part by the damage to my grandfather’s career and reputation after he was redbaited and smeared by McCarthyites under the infamous Broyles Bills of Illinois in the 1950s. My grandfather was a radical. His obituary in the journal College English said, “John deBoer was a fighter for freedom and for democratic ideas and behavior. Even within the NCTE he was in the forefront leading the way for human and social justice among the community of scholars who teach the English language arts long before such ideas were universally acceptable.” Under the protection of tenure, he was able to continue to work after the threat of the Broyles Bills and McCarthyism had largely passed, but his public standing and reputation were never the same.

This webpage includes testimony from one of my grandfather and grandmother’s friends, talking about the struggle against the Broyles Bills. It reads in part,

John was the U of I faculty member most publicly attacked as subversive by the pro-Broyles forces, and for that reason played no active role in the campaign. Henrietta [deBoer] was the devoted secretary of the ad hoc Committee Against the Broyles Bills throughout the Spring….Here in Illinois, the Broyles Bills were defeated, but the careers of some U of I individuals were seriously effected nonetheless. My husband, Norman Cazden, was denied tenure, although to my knowledge never publicly attacked as John DeBoer was. Like DeBoer, Norman played no role in the committee. I remember engaging in what might now be called magical thinking. If only we could win this campaign, maybe Norman’s job could be saved. And I’m sure those hopes, politically naïve as they turned out to be, added personal passion to my intellectual commitment to
the campaign.

When people call me paranoid or defensive about the fight against McCarthyism and redbaiting, they fail to understand: this is in my blood. But more importantly, they fail to see how efforts to silence and destroy radicals today is part of the same the effort to attack radicals like my grandfather. They are the same, wicked movement. Everything that happens has happened before, and will happen again. Some of us remember.