"Keep Communism out of Our Schools": Cold War Anti-Communism at the Toronto Board of Education, 1948-1951
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE ISSUES FACING the candidates for election to the 1948 Toronto Board of Education — school renovations, hot lunches for students, sex education, teacher salaries, and comic books in the schools — seemed far removed from the West's worsening relations with the Soviet Union. But one candidate was determined to remind voters that what was taking place overseas was much closer to their communities than they realized. Harold Menzies, a realtor and candidate for one of the two Trustee spots in Ward Five, distributed a campaign blotter urging voters to Keep Out of Schools. blotter depicted The Looter, a Karl Marx-like figure destroying Toronto schools and scooping up books with such titles as Our Way of Life. Appealing to voters to remember Poland, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — forcefully acquired Soviet satellite states — the implication was clear that the same fate could befall Canada. Don't be apathetic, the blotter warned, Your Innocent Children's Future Depends on YOUR VOTE. campaign document implied that the other Ward Five candidates, John Boyd and Edna Ryerson, were Communists whereas Menzies proclaimed himself as The Man Who Sees Danger in Communism and the Only Candidate Not a Communist. Menzies was not unknown to school Board voters, having served on the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".