The Purge and the Professoers

...Only incidentally did it involve a perception of leftist ideas as threatening established interests, although, of course, many rightwing demagogues and fanatics as well as opportunistic politicians jumped into the fray to try to link their ideological aversions and political adversaries to the new national enemy...

...Both times the entire nation was aroused against an external enemy whose alleged agents seemed both particularly menacing and readily identifiable...

...But Schrecker strains my credulity...

...This conveys the clear impression that it was these qualities that brought them under suspicion, as so much retrospective mythicizing of the period has maintained...

...Court decisions that struck down the worst abuses of the purgers were probably as much an effect as a cause of the altered atmosphere...

...And Marxists, except for a tiny few, were at this time pro-Soviet...

...Both of them were highly sophisticated Marxists, neither pro-Soviet nor anti-Stalinist left nor supporters of American cold war policies...

...Davis served six months in jail for having taken the principled risk of pleading the First rather than the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee...

...Of course Communist professors didn't pass out party cards or even copies of the Daily Worker in class, but it is hard to believe that many of them suppressed their views where they were relevant—Marxism, after all, is itself a heavily scholastic doctrine, not an inward spiritual faith...

...University authorities in the years of McCarthyism may often have bent with the prevailing winds against their own better judgment and their principles, believing that they were protecting their institutions from a gale of patriotic anger that could only grow stronger as war with the Soviet Union drew closer...

...That was hardly my impression as a university teacher in the late 1950s...

...I was glad to oblige and Davis went on to teach at the University of Toronto, though I am sure the Canadian authorities would have let him in without my intervention...

...She finds only three cases, each involving rather special circumstances, where this was not the case...

...The party had suffered losses since 1948, but the exodus of members after the speech became known was of the order of 90 percent, reducing the CP to the minuscule political sect it is today...

...There were, of course, no profascist or pro-Japanese university teachers to speak of—at most a few pacifist opponents of the war—so academic freedom never became an issue...

...Perhaps there was no connection, but he gave me the lowest grade I received in graduate school...

...citizenship...

...This happened in 1962...

...Its plausibility is enhanced by the rapidity with which the fears and obsessions of the early 1950s were dispelled by a surprising succession of events all occurring within less than four years...

...In so ambiguous a situation, when the country was neither clearly at peace nor at war, whether or not sympathizers with the national enemy should be allowed their customary peacetime civil liberties was bound to become an issue...

...Schrecker's subjects undoubtedly preferred, and still prefer, to see themselves as victims of persecution for their advanced or "critical" ideas, but she need not have taken their self-definitions at quite such face value...

...Schrecker insists repeatedly that her subjects did not proselytize in the classroom and even made a special effort to conceal from students not only their affiliation with the CP but, out of a principled belief in "objectivity," their general social and political views...

...What happened was bad enough without such imprecision, which also obscures just why it happened...

...Philosophers of social science have identified description, explanation, and evaluation as three distinct ways of assessing any historical phenomenon...

...By the late 1940s, the few remaining Communists in these fields were largely second-raters...

...There was, moreover, widespread apprehension, often amounting to virtual expectation, that a Third World War with the Soviet Union itself was imminent...

...But let us not exaggerate the effects of what happened, treating it as if it were a veritable fascist era in American life...

...I remember liberals with little tolerance for ambiguity wishing for a formal declaration of war against North Korea to clarify the legal situation...

...Their dilemmas were real ones, although I agree with Schrecker's conclusion, supported by several examples she mentions, that a firmer stand protecting academic freedom might well have prevailed...

...He stood out as a lively, articulate, wisecracking intelligence who brightened up the somnolent atmosphere of the faculty coffee lounge whenever he entered it between class periods...

...She fails, however, to bring them into central focus, falling back on facile moralizing about the venality and demagoguery of congressional politicians, the mendacity of "professional" ex-Communist witnesses, the spinelessness under pressure of university administrations, and the strictly conditional nature of the commitment of both faculty and administrators to civil liberties in general and academic freedom in particular...

...I STARTED MY ACADEMIC CAREER during those years, taught full-time or part-time at three universities that figure prominently in Schrecker's account, was a graduate student at a fourth, and actually came into contact with several of her subjects...

...Like demands were made fifteen years later during the similarly undeclared war in Vietnam...

...The disposition of a whole generation of academic leftists to see the essence of politics as the public display of one's sentiments through demonstrations, protest marches, signing petitions, and wearing buttons is also a heritage of the revolt against McCarthyism and the fearful silence it is alleged to have induced...

...The issue of the rights of teachers to refuse to provide information to government agencies and university administrations first emerged at the University of Washington in 1948...

...Schrecker describes several of her subjects as "absolute" civil libertarians, but one wonders how many of them had opposed the restrictions on civil liberties imposed during the Second World War...

...The teacher became quite flustered and red in the face, vehemently rejecting our arguments...

...I was introduced to him by a colleague who had known him as a fellow student at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research during its brief tenure at Columbia...

...265 Would I have done the same thing ten years earlier when the purgers were in full throat and I was untenured, degree-less, and lacking (as I still do) U.S...

...Only a few years elapsed, however, before a new generation of political radicals and "countercultural" rebels took over the campuses, inspired in part by the writings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and Norman 0. Brown, all of them professors published in the 1950s who were by no means invisible presences at their own or other universities...

...If this triad is applied to Ellen Schrecker's study of McCarthyism and American higher education, she earns high if not quite the highest marks for description, a solidly acceptable grade for overall evaluation, but not much more than a pass for explanation...

...Historical perspective involves both taking advantage of hindsight and trying to tell it as it was...

...Nathan Glazer has argued that Schrecker views her subject entirely in the context of the history of academic freedom whereas it should also be viewed within the context of the history of American Communism...

...One reflects gratefully, however, that the experience seems to have immunized us against any repetition, for there has been nothing remotely like it since, neither during the war in Vietnam nor in the course of the militantly anti-Soviet and rightwing Reagan administration...

...this may also have been true in lesser degree of those who had joined and left the party earlier as distinct from merely being in sympathy with it for a short time...

...Schrecker contends that conformity and mediocrity descended on the campus following the ravages of McCarthyism...

...She reports, however, in her opening chapter: "In many ways what happened to academic freedom during the First World War was similar to what would happen to it after the Second...

...I met Chandler Davis, a mathematician who is one of Schrecker's leading informants, a few times when his wife, today a justly famous historian, and I were colleagues on the faculty of Brown University...

...The CP, as Schrecker acknowledges, had been the major force on the American left since the 1930s...

...The New Left student movement, let us not forget, first won wide public notice by demonstrating in 1960 against a HUAC hearing in San Francisco...

...But she fails to mention that nearly all the academic authorities on Indochina actively supported the war until very late in the day...

...There were many causes for this, the most important perhaps being the decimation of the CP not by McCarthyism but in shocked reaction to Khrushchev's "secret speech"of 1956...

...Since my recollections have influenced my view of the book, I shall make a point of specifying them where relevant...

...There was the death of Stalin, the end of the Korean war, the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy, the "spirit of Geneva"—the first interlude of what was even then called "détente" in U.S.-Soviet relations—Khrushchev's speech that caused a crisis among Communists, and the Hungarian Revolution that deepened the crisis and exposed as fantasy right-wing Republican slogans of "rollback" in Eastern Europe...

...The situation may have been different in the natural sciences, which provided a considerable number of Schrecker's victims, but, her judgment to the contrary notwithstanding, the humanities and the social sciences do not seem to have suffered any marked deterioration in intellectual quality as a result of the purge...

...The height of the purge coincided with a full though undeclared war between the United States and a lesser Asian Communist state and for a time even with China, the largest and second most powerful Communist state...

...She makes it unmistakably clear at the outset that charges of past or present CP membership, not Marxist, radical, or "progressive" opinions as such, were what endangered the jobs of faculty members...

...Former students of another professor whom Schrecker interviewed, who lost his job but was ultimately vindicated by the courts, have told me that he habitually gave low grades to Trotskyists and defended doing so when confronted by them in his office...

...and on the special situation of physical scientists requiring security clearances to do nuclear research...

...McCarthyism was the result of a spy scare following the discovery of several real spy rings and of the arousal or revival of a patriotic wartime mentality that had never fully subsided in the few years after 1945...

...Most major universities were investigated and several score faculty members, including a few who were tenured, lost their jobs, the majority for pleading the Fifth Amendment when questioned about their present or, far more frequently, past membership in the Communist party (CP...

...By far the most outstanding figure lost for good to American scholarship as a result of the Red purge was the late Sir Moses I. Finley, who emigrated to Britain, became one of the world's foremost classical historians, won a chair at Cambridge, and was knighted...

...a year later would come the fateful encounter with congressional investigators that led to his dismissal from Rutgers after he pleaded the Fifth Amendment rather than 264 name names...

...Several younger purge victims in the humanities and social sciences, most of them at Harvard, an irresistible target for the purgers, later had distinguished academic careers that were only briefly interrupted by their dismissals...

...It would, I am fully persuaded, have been preferable to the purge of Communist-linked teachers that took place to have simply ignored and left them all alone, even if some of them may have indoctrinated like mad in the classroom and flunked anti-Communist students right and left...

...The purge occurred only a few years after the Second World War at a time of what had shortly before been christened "cold" rather than "hot" (that is, shooting) war with the Soviet Union...

...SCHRECKER'S FAITHFUL AND SCRUPULOUS documentation overwhelms one with a sense of the enormous waste, absurdity, and moral squalor of the whole business...

...She does not, however, do justice to the political and historical context of the late 1940s and early 1950s when unprecedented and neversincerepeated official investigations of the political beliefs and associations of teachers took place at a time of national concern over the alleged infiltration of American society by Communists...

...WHY DID IT HAPPEN and why at that particular time...

...The Communist party had strongly supported prosecution under the Smith Act of Trotskyists, as well as native fascists, and even refused to rescind this past support when its own leaders were prosecuted during the Cold War...

...At the very end of the book, she observes that "Patriotism, not expedience, sustained the academic community's willingness to collaborate with McCarthyism...

...That the change took place so suddenly is one reason why we look back today on the McCarthy era as a bizarre, hysterical period of mindless madness and malice...

...SCHRECKER REPEATS the oft-told tale that the discrediting of leading East Asian scholars deprived the United States of expert advice that might have prevented its disastrous involvement in Vietnam...

...Schrecker never so much as mentions the general restrictions on civil liberties during the Second World War...

...I took a course in 1947 from a teacher she mentions several times, a former Communist who pleaded the Fifth Amendment but did not lose his job, his academic superiors defending him on the grounds that he never used his classes "for propaganda purposes...

...on the University of California oath controversy in the late 1940s...

...The dismissal of three tenured faculty members for refusing to answer questions asked by a state legislative committee set the pattern for the next five or six years when the notorious committees of Congress, including the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate subcommittees chaired by Senators McCarthy, Jenner, and McCarran, directed their attention to Communists in higher education...

...Perhaps Schrecker should also have interviewed a few of her subjects' former students...

...The main political consequence of McCarthyism was to provide a new target of protest for the dying left, sinking under the incubus of the CP, and a few years later to lay the foundations for a revitalized campus radicalism free of that incubus...

...She is excellent in telling us what happened, and her judgment that the whole experience was pointless and demeaning is scarcely open to doubt...

...She also draws on a number of earlier interviews conducted by others...

...She misreports the import of Lazarsfeld and Thielens's 1958 survey, The Academic Mind, which tended to refute rather than confirm Robert Hutchins's claim that "the spirit of the teaching profession" was being "crushed by McCarthyism...

...I more or less agree with that, but from the standpoint of explaining the purge and the response to it the most important context, I think, is the history of national mobilization in wartime...

...I knew him slightly when we were both teaching at the Newark branch of Rutgers...

...Schrecker reports in detail on the Rapp-Coudert Committee investigation of Communists on the faculty of the New York City colleges nearly a decade before the alarms of the cold war...

...She is right both times, but fails to give sufficient weight to the implications of these statements...

...But this is inevitably a retrospective view...

...There was certainly a short-lived decline in radical activism...

...I think I would have, but some doubt is inevitable...

...One day a young woman, evidently well informed from Trotskyist sources, challenged him and I backed her up...

...The year after I left Brown, Natalie Davis telephoned to ask if I would put in a word to higher-ups in the Canadian government, where she knew I had connections, urging that her husband be granted permission to move to Canada, despite his "criminal" record...

...Schrecker is better at the former than the latter...

...Nevertheless, she constantly refers to her subjects as "left-wing activists," "idealists," "political non-conformists," "dissenters," "anti-authoritarians," "radicals of one sort or another," "critics of the political status quo," or "absolute civil libertarians...

...Thirty or forty years ago even Communist professors probably drew a sharper line between scholarship and partisanship than later New Left radicals who assailed the norm of "value-freedom...

...He wished to assume a teaching position there, his first, as Schrecker reports, since his dismissal a decade earlier from the University of Michigan and subsequent blacklisting...

...Political activism and productive scholarship are likely to be at odds, as Schrecker herself notes...

...Schrecker is a thorough and conscientious enough scholar to have assembled all the ingredients required for an answer...

...Schrecker's major new source material is the interviews she conducted with nearly all persons still living who lost their academic jobs for refusing to cooperate with the committees as well as the few who cooperated to the extent of "naming names...

...Although his subject was fairly 263 remote from politics, he managed to refer frequently to how well its problems were handled in the Soviet Union...