The Beloved Professor and War Hero Persecuted in a Government Crusade Against Blacks and Gays
In a dark American chapter, a powerful politician targeted anyone connected to civil rights or homosexuality. A new investigation puts a human face on a travesty with chilling modern parallels.
As a plague of ideological panic took hold across the United States, in the state of Florida one charismatic leader led an all-out campaign to silence queer and Black voices on university campuses. The year was 1959. The “Johns Committee” led by State Senator Charley Johns, was purportedly founded to defend America from Communist spies, but its main result was ruining the lives and careers of more than 30 preeminent scholars, at least 71 teachers and as many as 500 expelled students. The crusade of the Johns Committee and its nearly decade-long reign have all but vanished from the American story, the records sealed and then censored upon release. Now, using a secret trove of primary source documents that have been decoded and de-censored for the first time in history, longtime Narratively contributor Robert W. Fieseler has unraveled the mystery of what actually happened behind the closed doors of an inquisition that held ordinary citizens ransom to its extraordinary abuses. Robert’s book, American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives, was recently published by Penguin Random House. This story is an adapted excerpt.
Sigismond deRudesheim Diettrich received his call from the Committee on the evening of Monday, January 19, 1959. That afternoon, Diettrich, a renowned authority on Florida geography and department chair at the University of Florida, administered a final exam to his afternoon class and then returned to his home in Gainesville.
Drained from a long semester, Diettrich found a plush chair and fell into a dreamless slumber. His schedule hardly let up all year round. His wife, Iren, who taught piano lessons from their home, had constant health expenses stemming from a malarial condition aggravated by the Florida climate. Then there were the never-ending rounds of grading, due this semester by January 29. After daily and nightly extracurriculars, Dr. Diettrich answered correspondence and crafted grant proposals at his home office until well after two or three in the morning.
Every Sunday, Diettrich rejuvenated body and spirit as choir director for St. Patrick Catholic Church, where Iren played the organ. As a Hungarian Catholic immigrant, Diettrich had become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1938 and reveled in the “mighty fine feeling” of being a legitimate Floridian. Compared to the hovels of his upbringing, he now lived in a palatial estate, a single-family Florida home that represented the promise of an American century made manifest.
At around 6 p.m., the Florida sun had already set, and the house sat in eerie darkness. Cutting through the stillness, the telephone rang. Roused from his nap, Diettrich supposed it might be a colleague or a student panicked about final exams. Mentees in the graduate program did feel comfortable calling him at home and had lovingly nicknamed him “Dr. D.” He picked up the receiver. Holding it to his ear, he must have looked cherubically tousled.
He had a kind, round face that many strangers took to be unformidable at first glance. He stood a mere 5-foot-8, with dark brown hair that, ordinarily slicked back, fell into his face when he hustled. Slightly round about the waist, he was wont to tuck his button-down shirts in his khaki pants and cinch everything high with a belt. “Hello, this is Sig,” Diettrich spoke into the receiver clearly and deliberately, his speech lightly accented. Diettrich, as with many of his generation, treated someone on the other end of a telephone line with a form of reverence.
“It was somebody or other most politely inviting me to appear before Charley Johns’s committee right away,” recalled Diettrich. “I went.”