(Bella Dodd was a member of the Communist Party's National...)
Bella Dodd was a member of the Communist Party's National Committee that tried to infiltrate and undermine the American School System. She later learns the true objectives of the party and returns to the Catholic Faith of her youth.
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lawyer teacher labor union activist
Dodd was born Maria Assunta Isabella Visono, in October 1904 in Picerno, near Potenza, Italy. She was the daughter of Rocco Visono, a stonemason who emigrated to the United States and became a grocer in East Harlem, New York City, and Teresa Marsica. Visono did not join her family in New York until she was five.
Bella attended public schools in New York and Westchester; her entry into Evander Childs High School, in the Bronx, was delayed for a year by a trolley accident that resulted in the amputation of her left foot. She graduated in 1921, won a state scholarship, and attended Hunter College in New York with the intention of becoming a teacher. She received her B. A. with honors in 1925. She was working toward her M. A. (1927) at Columbia University and her law degree (1930) at New York University.
Visono spent one semester as a substitute teacher in the history department of Seward Park High School in Manhattan. In February 1926 she joined the Department of Political Science at Hunter. Later in 1930 she was admitted to the bar. In 1932 economic pressures brought Dodd back to teaching at Hunter, where she helped organize the Hunter CollegeInstructors Association to fight for bread-and-butter issues for low-rank personnel. Attempts to extend that organization citywide proved short-lived but led Dodd into the Anti-Fascist Literature Committee; members of the committee, in turn, introduced her to Communis tindividuals and organizations. Although she wished to join the Communist party, she was advised to avoid formal association. Dodd instead became legislative representative of Teachers' Union Local 5 of the American Federation of Teachers. She also served as a delegate to the American Federation of Labor Central Trades and Labor Council. There, according to her account, she operated as an agent for Communist interests.
In 1938 she resigned from Hunter to work full-time for the union. She pressured the New York State Board of Education to regularize the employment of substitute teachers who actually worked full-time without commensurate benefits. That effort proved unsuccessful, as did her bid in 1938 for election to the New York State Assembly as the American Labor party candidate in the Tenth Assembly District of New York City. Dodd worked particularly hard after the 1939 state-aid-to-education bill authorized the Rapp-Coudert investigation into the subversive activities of New York City teachers. She helped organize the Friends of the Free Public Schools to raise funds to distribute information, tried to rally community support through Save Our Schools clubs, and advised teachers who were to be questioned about their left-wing political affiliations. Dodd continued as legislative representative of the Teachers' Union after the American Federation of Teachers expelled Communist-associated locals in 1940. She unsuccessfully advocated the establishment of public nursery schools, a proposal primarily intended to employ teachers. As liaison to various unions, she collected campaign funds for such candidates as the leftist congressman Vito Marcantonio - usually, she later testified, to advance Communist goals. And she helped establish the School for Democracy, an adult-education project intended to give jobs to teachers displaced by the Rapp-Coudert investigation. This school evolved into the Jefferson School of Social Science. In 1943 Gil Green, the New York State chairman of the Communist party, asked Dodd to formally join the Communist party; her membership was announced at the party's national convention in 1944.
In June 1944 she left her position with the Teachers' Union but remained a contact with various teachers' groups. She established a law office in midtown Manhattan and was elected to the New York State Board of the Communist party and to the National Committee of the Communist party. She later said that she was troubled when the Communist party expelled its one-time leader Earl Browder and several thousand others between 1945 and 1947. Dodd also faced party charges on a number of occasions. In 1946 the Communist party first proposed, and then unaccountably withdrew, her name as a candidate for attorney general of New York State. The party rejected her expressed desire to leave, but she withdrew from most party activities except contact with teachers' groups. In June 1949 she was expelled on charges of being antiblack, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-Semitic, antilabor, and the defender of a landlord - accusations that she found incredible in view of her record. Dodd's legal practice declined; her party and teacher friends withdrew; and she experienced great confusion, refusing to write newspaper articles on her break with the party. Subpoenaed by Abe Fortas to appear before the Tydings Committee in defenseof Owen Lattimore, who had been accused of being a Soviet agent, Dodd testified that she had not known Lattimore to be a Communist. This experience caused her to reassess her thinking.
At Easter 1952 Dodd rejoined the Roman Catholic church. Over the next five years she testified several times before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, receiving considerable publicity in 1953 for her revelations about Communism and teachers. In January 1953 she was named a visiting lecturer in political philosophy at St. John's University Law School in New York City and continued to teach courses in labor law and legislative law as an adjunct faculty member there until 1961. In 1954 she published a confessional autobiography, School of Darkness. The following year she formed the law firm of Dodd, Cardiello, and Blair, within which she concentrated on advocacy for the disadvantaged. Dodd stood unsuccessfully for election to the New York State Supreme Court as a Conservative in 1965 and 1966.
On April 29, 1969, at age 64, Dodd died in Manhattan, New York, New York after undergoing gall bladder surgery. She was buried at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Pleasantville, New York.
Dodd is best remembered as a member of the Communist Party of America in the 1930's and 1940's, who later became a vocal anti-communist. In 1953, she testified before a televised hearing of the U. S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee about widespread Party infiltration of labor unions and other institutions.
(Bella Dodd was a member of the Communist Party's National...)
After her defection from the Communist Party in 1949, Dodd testified that one of her jobs, as a Communist agent, was to encourage young radicals to enter Roman Catholic Seminaries.
In 1968, Dodd made an unsuccessful attempt to become a member of the US Congress as a candidate of the New York Conservative Party; she lost by a significant margin. She came in last place with 3% of the vote, against Democratic incumbent Leonard Farbstein (easily reelected with 53%), Donald Weeden (Republican), Ralph Denat (Liberal), and David McReynolds (Peace and Freedom).
On a trip to Europe, Bella met John Dodd, whom she married in September 1931; they had no children. In 1940 she separated from her husband; he obtained a divorce about two years later.
