In 1961, one of my High School teachers in a small CA town,
was anonymously accused of being a Communist. He taught French and Spanish at our little high school, and was one of the nicest, most helpful teachers I remember from those days. An anonymous letter was sent to the school board by someone in the town, and this great teacher was almost fired from his job, based on an anonymous accusation. This was the environment at the time. People were Commie-crazy, looking for "Reds" under their beds and everywhere else.
Anyhow, a school board meeting/hearing was held about this. Nobody showed up to own up to the anonymous accusation. Many people, however, who knew this teacher, including me and a dozen or so other current students, did show up and provided our input in support of our teacher. My father went there, too, and spoke about the honesty and upstanding nature of the man.
Even so, the school board was actually taking this anonymous and unsupported accusation seriously, and came within a frog hair of firing one of the best teachers at that school. I never heard him say a single word about politics at all. I doubt he thought about it all that much. What he did talk about was the culture of France in our French classes. In the Spanish classes, he talked about differences between different Spanish-speaking countries, with regard to pronunciation, primarily.
In the end, he was not fired, but the entire thing took a toll on him, and he became far more reticent in the classroom and less creative with his teaching methods.
Anonymous accusations, without support, are often used in attempts to discredit people, often based on some personal animosity or some old grudge. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
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