Party in this country set itself up as the one organization that was fighting fascism." Harriet Silverman introduced her to Party leader Earl Browder. Teachers urged her to attend a "Class Room Teachers Association," through which she learned of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) and the Teachers Union (TU). She saw Celia Lewis, Clara Richer, and Max Diamond emerge as leaders of the TU's "Red minority." A first bill she helped pass led to her promotion as a TU legislative representative, for which she took a six-month leave of absence from Hunter College in Spring 1936, taking over from TU co-founder Abraham Lefkowitz. (Charles J. Hendley was TU president 1935–1945.) Party leaders like Jack Stachel and William Z. Foster demanded that American workers become "politicalized" and "proletarianized." Through the intervention of friend and mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Dodd got leave again. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), teachers volunteered for the Lincoln Brigade: Dodd names Sid Babsky and Ralph Wardlaw. TU membership rose above 9,000, with a tenth communists. So many college teachers joined that they formed their own New York City College Teachers Union Local 537 AFT. Dorothy Wallace joined the TU as "minder" for the Soviets, under her brother, vice president Dale Zysman (Party name "Jack Hardy") who had trained in Moscow. Henry Linville and Abraham Lefkowitz split from the TU to form the New York City Teacher Guild. By 1938, Dodd resigned from Hunter College and took a full-time position in the pro-communist TU, and moved her family to Poughkeepsie to ease access to state legislators in Albany. In 1939, the Hitler-Stalin Pact undermined the TU's public position, and the Rapp-Coudert Committee started its anti-communist investigations, subpoenaing more than 600 teachers suspected of communist sympathies. Dodd secretly burned a list of TU members in her possession. By 1940, opposition to the TU had gathered: Linville and Lefkowitz rallied George Googe and other anti-communists from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and individuals including George Counts and John Childs of Teachers College, George Axtelle, Lovestoneites led by Ben Davidson, and teachers from Detroit, Atlanta, and Washington. The Party formed a "Committee to Defend the Public Schools" and Dodd headed a "Women's Trade Union Committee for Peace." By that time, Dodd worked for NY Teacher's Union (TU) and the American Labor Party, but also secretly for the Communist Party. City College of New