Robert Hutchins Meets the Press
BEICHMAN, ARNOLD
Fund for the Republic president attempts defense of his rule ROBERT HUTCHINS MEETS THE PRESS By Arnold Beichman The Fund for the Republic has reached the climactic moment in its five-year...
...Knowles as "a courageous and effective defense of democratic principles...
...the secretary whispers the letter was written last April...
...Over several weeks, it had been full and heavy...
...as to whether she'd ever been a Communist...
...It's up to Landman to show the documents, says Ferry...
...Its bibliography on Communism had become a page-one controversy...
...In the long run, however, it is obvious that the busy individuals who constitute its Board cannot supervise all its activities, select its personnel, and counteract the special prejudices of its president...
...Did Hutchins favor Government investigations of Communist activities in America...
...He is a threat to the work of all foundations...
...Of course not...
...Questions from the reporters around the rim of the table were blunt, the TV kliegs were hot and glaring, but Hutchins kept smoking his cork-tipped cigarettes and you'd never have known he was ruffled except for the over-luminous eyes and the troubled, tight, unchanging little smile...
...If you show a Walter Gellhorn, you can also show a Rowland Watts, all of them on Fund project payrolls...
...Hutchins is no threat to Communism or to civil liberties...
...One of the Fund's directors, Arthur H. Dean, a close personal friend of Secretary of State Dulles, had resigned...
...But recently its published bibliography on American Communism has been attacked as bad scholarship by knowledgeable anti-Communist liberals...
...Period...
...Exactly when had the program begun...
...A Fund Board member called her "a loyal American...
...Hutchins defended the disproportionate distribution of the Griswold book as against the Williams pamphlet by stating not only that it was "a matter of judgment" but also that the Hutchins point of view paralleled the Griswold point of view...
...The Fund originally maintained that "the major factor affecting civil liberties today is the menace of Communism and Communist influence in America"—and its $50,000-a-year president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, now says he wouldn't hesitate to hire a Communist party member...
...Fund for the Republic president attempts defense of his rule ROBERT HUTCHINS MEETS THE PRESS By Arnold Beichman The Fund for the Republic has reached the climactic moment in its five-year existence...
...What, then, did he think of the Senate investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations...
...when asked whether he regards the Communist party as an adjunct of the Soviet Union, he can answer...
...you must be all right, particularly if you weren't an "informer...
...The Dickerman Williams paper, Hutchins declared, was a "technical law-review article" suitable only for legal experts and, therefore, for limited circulation...
...Normally, this would not be altogether a matter of great concern...
...Was the letter written before the Taft-Sessions-Farrell criticism of the bibliography or after...
...The Hutchins answer was that the distribution program had begun before he became president...
...If you say you're for civil liberties, it doesn't matter what you are, what your credentials are...
...For some time, the Fund has been under attack by the three Ls—the American Legion, Fulton Lewis Jr...
...But the Fund ostensibly "takes no position" on these controversial matters...
...That is why he can accept (but then reject under direct pressure from Ford Foundation members) an award for services rendered to the cause of freedom from the Communist-line Teachers Union...
...Hutchins wants to read a letter from the national director, National Americanism Commission, American Legion, praising the bibliography, and he starts reading...
...No mention was made of the distribution, in the tens of thousands, of reprints of the first chapter in Griswold's book to college faculties throughout the country...
...This is, in effect, what the Fund is now doing...
...So, the Plymouth Meeting Library in Pennsylvania gets a $5,000 award for hiring and keeping Mrs...
...Have Encyclopaedia articles on Communism ever been criticized...
...What kind of documents were they, Mr...
...Mary Knowles, one-time secretary to the defunct Communist Samuel Adams School in Boston...
...Several questions later, it turns out that the Fund's vice-president and public relations expert, W. H. (Ping) Ferry, had been shown documents by Landman which convinced him of Landman's break with the Communist party...
...Under Clifford Case, it seemed clear that the Fund was aware equally of the problem of civil liberties and the problem of Communist subversion of those liberties...
...Now there is danger that the reaction to Hutchins's rule over the Fund will be so extreme as to injure other foundations through legislation restricting their legitimate activities...
...Did he regard the Communist party as a menace to civil liberties...
...How were they chosen...
...The issue is not what the Fund for the Republic stands for nor is it the majority of the projects it is financing...
...The question is whether this can be done by a tax-exempt foundation using tax money to influence legislation...
...Knowles took the Fifth Amendment ("that's what it's for," says Hutchins, "to be used, isn't it...
...Why had the Fund hired press agent Amos Landman, who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...
...Flicker of annoyance—no date, it's a copy...
...How about the distribution of books, articles and other material which were "one-sided" on the civil liberties issue...
...Anyway, the question was academic since Hutchins would hire a present Communist party member to work for the Fund if he had the right qualifications for the job...
...Its May 1955 report was full of sweeping charges stated as fact—"the range of suspected persons has been enormously extended by resort to guilt by association," "the evidence offered to show that a man is a danger to American institutions has often been farcically remote," "a kind of continuous propaganda and social pressure has been kept up that has tended to suppress conscientious non-conformity...
...The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are open and above board, but they are not tax-exempt, American foundations have, on the whole, done a remarkable job for public welfare and enlightenment...
...Oh, before the attack...
...The present problem is Hutchins...
...Here is a librarian who has served in an important Communist party educational post, now transformed into a $5,000 symbol of martyrdom to the cause of intellectual independence...
...Any individual or corporation in our free culture has the right to conduct ideological warfare against Government security programs, Congressional investigations, unwise legislation...
...Another end-run by another secretary—the program had begun in November 1954 after Hutchins had been in for several months...
...even the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which he was chairman, has been criticized, is the Hutchins answer by analogy...
...the onetime ritualistic liberal (in Hook's phrase) and today, keeping up with the times, the "ritualistic anti-Communists...
...My opinions aren't important...
...Analogy spurlos versenkt...
...Of course, it has been criticized...
...We don't know...
...Beyond that, the Fund itself is doing important, even necessary work...
...Another secretarial end-run...
...Hutchins has argued that the sole standard for judging a teacher is professional competence...
...Interruption—what's the date on the letter...
...Perhaps a friendly, face-to-face meeting with newspapermen would help to shift opinion...
...what were the criteria...
...Thus he would free the Fund for the Republic from a burden it can no longer bear and, more urgently, remove a distinct threat to American foundations...
...That is why...
...Bench and bar" was a mistake, it turned out after a hurried end-run by a secretary: 12,000 had been distributed to laymen and the rest—23,000—to "bench and bar...
...We're now studying to see if there is a greater menace to civil liberties than the Communist party...
...and Hutchins described the library's hiring of Mrs...
...and David Lawrence...
...On the same rainy Monday that the Ford Motor Company was announcing that it would sell its stock on Wall Street, Robert Hutchins, charged with allocation of $15 million of one-time Ford money, was telling a press conference that membership in the Communist party is no bar to employment by the Fund...
...Hutchins replies that Landman had satisfied him that he had left the party in 1939...
...Alan Barth, Telford Taylor, titles like "Faceless Informers and Our Schools," "To Insure the End of Our Hysteria" and so on...
...Hutchins had hired, as a press agent, a man with a long pro-Communist record who had taken the Fifth Amendment before a Senate committee...
...If you ask why distribution of 35,000 copies of Erwin Griswold's book, The Fifth Amendment Today (but no distribution of Sidney Hook's Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No or Norman Thomas's Test of Freedom or articles on the subject by Alan F. Westin), the answer is that the Fund did distribute the C. Dickerman Williams paper, "The Fifth Amendment, Its Uses and Abuses"—1,000 copies, that is...
...It depended on what these legislative investigations were for—to lay the foundations for legislation, for example...
...since nobody would say why, the rumors and allegations were anti-Fund...
...Why, then, was the Griswold book distributed, according to the Fund's own report, to "bench and bar"—35,000 copies...
...Ferry...
...There he sat at the head of a long U-shaped table, dark, handsome, lean...
...If you look at the Fund roster and find Helen Lynd, you can look on another page and find Daniel Bell...
...Is there any idea of withdrawing the bibliography because of criticisms...
...If the published results of its manifold projects are to receive the respect of democratic, liberal opinion in America, Robert Maynard Hutchins should end his disingenuous disguise as an embattled scholar dedicated to the never-ending quest for truth, and resign immediately...
...But, says the report on the same page (no doubt sensitive to the tax-exemption nerve): "The Fund for the Republic takes no position on these matters, beyond affirming its faith in the principles upon which our government is founded...
...Hutchins said he didn't know about the investigation...
...Its Board of Directors must now decide whether it wants to be a tax-exempt foundation, dedicated to performing good works, or wants to be the $15-million propaganda vehicle of its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, for the dissemination of his personal views...
...As an executive of a foundation dedicated to strengthening civil liberties in America, Hutchins is in an anomalous position because, fundamentally, he regards the Communist party as a "party," and uncompromising anti-Communist intellectuals as just one step above Senator Jenner...
...This statement Landman had declined to make under oath, but somehow Hutchins had been convinced...
...The press conference, suggested by the Fund, was obviously intended to reverse the anti-Fund, anti-Hutchins publicity tide...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 46
