Double Jeopardy
FRIED, RICHARD
Double Jeopardy No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities By Ellen W. Schrecker Oxford. 437pp. $20.95. Reviewed by Richard Fried Associate professor of history, University of Illinois...
...It became the rule that a teacher owed his colleagues, "complete candor and perfect integrity," and that taking the Fifth placed upon him "a heavy burden of proof' as to his fitness to teach...
...The author surmises that over 100 academics were so affected...
...or got jobs at black colleges (where political pressures sometimes caught them again...
...Tenured professors at elite private colleges stood a better chance of keeping their jobs than those at public institutions reliant on legislative funding...
...Untenured instructors were generally let go—without the procedural niceties accorded senior professors...
...some cooperated covertly with the FBI in vetting their faculties...
...Pressures started to mount at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when many on the Left lost tolerance for Communists...
...They never tried to indoctrinate their students, she says, for doing so would have been both risky and "unprofessional...
...The inquisitors, search as they might, were never able to document it...
...Campus anti-Communists, notably other Leftists, might have told a different story...
...Reviewed by Richard Fried Associate professor of history, University of Illinois at Chicago There are few happy books about the McCarthy era— and this isn't one of them...
...Or to some immunity it built up as a result of having been targeted by Rightwing enemies of the La Follette regime in the 1930s...
...It is commendable that she interviewed some 70 of those swept into the investigative wringer...
...A bevy of noisy local Rightists pestered Colorado College...
...The strongest evidence of such meddling on campus that the Internal Security Subcommittee could unearth in its 1952 hearings was an account of goings-on at a university in Communist China...
...But most who had lost their jobs found themselves on an academic blacklist...
...Above and beyond that fear, though, stood a pervasive campus hostility toward Communism...
...She traces the fate of academic Communists, ex-Communists and other Leftists who took the Fifth or otherwise defied investigators...
...A new phase began in 1953 when Congress, previously unconcerned with the universities, busily started combing faculties for Communists...
...Intriguingly, the University of Wisconsin had no "McCarthy era...
...The author might in this connection have examined more minutely the attitudes of faculty who tolerated the dismissals...
...The research is prodigious: Schrecker has quarried numerous university archives and tracked down scores of participants and eyewitnesses...
...The impact of Allen's axiom, and of a growing anti-Communist consensus fueled by the Korean War, was evident in the next major episode, the fight over the University of California loyalty oath...
...She sheds light on many dark corners, including why the American Association of University Professors' national office was so palsied during the crisis years...
...Yet "academic freedom," a fine-sounding phrase, had always been narrowly defined, even before Communism became a serious issue...
...Indeed, the claim that Communist professors propagandized in class was a weak one...
...She estimates, too, that academics constituted about 20 per cent of all witnesses before anti-Communist investigations...
...Louis, announced that he would search for traces of Communism...
...In the following two years the Senate Internal Securities Subcommittee (headed by Albert E. Jen-ner Jr...
...Itwasapre-emptive declaration: No inquiry took place, and Washington University managed to avoid bother...
...The book is also biased toward the cats that got caught in the trees...
...Some will differ with her view of academic Communists—"nobody here but us anti-fascists"—yet this does not diminish her judicious and trenchant central criticism of the academy's woeful performance during the McCarthy era...
...Responding to a raucous probe of Communism by the State Legislature, President Raymond Allen launched proceedings that led to the ouster of three professors (two admitting CP membership, the third denying it...
...She concedes that the Communist Party was "conspiratorial" and "undemocratic," but finds these aspects of the party remote from the lives of its academic members, who as intellectuals and professionals were subject to a minimum of party discipline...
...the House Un-American Activities Committee (under Harold H. Velde) and Joe McCarthy's Permanent Investigations Subcommittee subpoenaed many professors, often citing recalcitrant ones for contempt of Congress...
...Teachers who did not "cooperate" with Congressional committees usually lost their jobs— and invariably did if they also concealed their politics from the university committees that took up where the legislators left off...
...Events at the University of Washington in 1948-1949 set the pattern...
...She effectively teases out the motives of university presidents and trustees, who feared political repercussions from anything less than a stalwartly anti-Communist stance...
...Schrecker thus argues that academic Communists did not fit their enemies' stereotype...
...In effect, once mum before a Congressional committee, a professor had to tell all to his fellows or riskbeing fired...
...Balky witnesses typically faced more hearings back on campus—proceedings that put the burden of proof on the accused...
...Administrators actually responded diversely, depending on whether the local political atmosphere was stormy or serene...
...The Cold War nationalized the purge of the campus Left...
...The blacklist—never formalized—had expired by the mid-'60s, and those who wished to return to academe could generally do so...
...There were several stages to the inquisition...
...Ellen W. Schrecker, a Princeton historian, tells of American higher education's flawed response to the challenges posed by the Wisconsin Senator and his allies...
...What about the relatively unscathed campuses...
...Further, McCarthyite flareups at backwater schools often revealed a strain of anti-intellectualism that is scanted by Schrecker's tendency to dwell on episodes at more imposing universities—the Ivy League, the Big 10 and the Pacific Coast Conference...
...or switched to other fields (several became psychotherapists...
...Quibbles aside, No Ivory Tower is a fine book...
...Schrecker stoutly condemns the academy for not protecting these souls from the gales of McCarthyism...
...Perhaps electing McCarthy to the Senate fulfilled the State's obligations...
...Allen laid down what would become the accepted orthodoxy: Communists forfeited any right to teach because they took orders from a conspiratorial, authoritarian entity and therefore lacked the requisite intellectual independence...
...Why then did the academy succumb so easily...
...Anti-Communism's cultural dimension warrants a closer look...
...NoIvory Tower reveals how dimly academics understood the Fifth Amendment and how new the issue of its use was...
...Not surprisingly, they emphasized the benign facets of party life...
...The fact that Communists were quickly excluded from its shelter troubles the author...
...Treatment of accused Communists varied...
...Was this due to its canny president and strong, protective alumni...
...each year at contract time they sent its president a list of faculty who should be fired...
...The story is bleak...
...One instructor was kiddingly told he was slipping—he hadn't made that year's list...
...There were other modestly happy cases...
...They went abroad...
...Schrecker underscores deepening Cold War anxieties...
...The 1940 Rapp-Coudert probe of New York City teachers, and the subsequent firings, provided an early model for later developments...
...Nothing happened...
...In 1950, Arthur H. Compton, president of Washington University in St...
...it implied professional autonomy, rather than any broad liberty...
...As Cold War tensions eased in the late '50s, so did the hunt for campus Communists...
Vol. 69 • November 1986 • No. 16
