Pride and Perjury
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
Writers & Writing PRIDE AND PERJURY BY DAVID M. OSHINSKY During the McCarthy years, several hundred professors—including a few Communists and many former Communists—were hounded by...
...His decision was based on a number of factors: the Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the desire to incorporate science and social change into his life...
...Having lied about his Communist activities under oath, he could not speak truthfully about them in the future without subjecting himself to great legal risk...
...Even without naming others," Holmesadds, "these revelations would be acutely embarrassing, potentially fatal to his professional reputation, and a repudiation of his avowed position against testifying before an 'immoral' proceeding...
...Novikoff: I had dropped from activities with the Communists before that, yes...
...and that he wasnow"arespected scientist...
...Most professors (and virtually all administrators) agreed that Communists should be barred from teaching in colleges...
...Novikoff got his first hint of trouble during World War II...
...Indeed, upon returning to Vermont Novikoff found his testimony on page one of the Burlington Daily News...
...Novikoff concluded that he had to leave New York City for good...
...Novikoff was an honorable man, says Holmes...
...Why did Novikoff remain in the party for so long (from 1937 until atleast 1946...
...There are few heroes in the Novikoff story...
...They claimed that academic freedom did not protect party membership because the party was a conspiratorial organization that demanded blind obedience from its followers...
...He had told the committee everything he intended to say—that he had not been a Communist while at Vermont, and that he would not discuss his past or talk about other people...
...Holmes carefully reminds the reader that Novikoff could not testify freely about his Communist past in 1953 without admitting that he had perjured himself before the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1941...
...He left in order to save his scientific career...
...It was an exquisite moment for him, a time to remember how much he had suffered and how far he had come...
...Many of those subpoenaed by Jenner were Novikoff's former colleagues from Brooklyn Collège...
...And this required naming names...
...It seems likely, therefore, that Novikoff's real problem was not his religion or his ethnicity, but rather his refusal to testify about his past—a refusal based partly on personal honor, which he liked to emphasize in public, and partly on personal survival, which he tended to downplay or ignore...
...The use of the Fifth Amendment as a " morally acceptable middle ground" had yet to be discovered...
...People there were proud of his accomplishments, and no one showed much interest in his past...
...Question: So, if there ever was a time that you were connected with the Communist Party, it wasn't coming to the University of Vermont that dropped you from it, you had dropped long before that...
...completely absorbed" in his vital cancer research...
...For one thing, a complete list of his Communist activities, compiled by Rapp-Coudert Committee investigators, had been sent to the FBI...
...Novikoff: I have thought ofthat as you know because I wished there was a way for you to examine my brain...
...His good fortune—and ours—was that he had the opportunity to pursue his destiny in the halls of academe...
...After graduating from Columbia College with honors at age 18, young Novikoff was denied admission to all the local medical schools...
...What about Novikoff the scientist...
...Still, as David Holmes wisely reminds us, the Novikoff story was special, the ending unique...
...For another, the decision to commit perjury had painted Novikoff into a corner...
...His own colleagues on the UVM faculty were badly divided over his refusal to testify...
...Jenner was absent...
...Its final report declared that Novikoff had been a candid and cooperative witness...
...Holmes' account of Novikoff's radical past is both objective and richly detailed...
...He felt no pity for his friend, whom he would soon have reason to fear...
...But according to Holmes, both sides realized "that Novikoff's claims about being free of Communism since 1948 [would be] credible onlyif there was some clarity and openness about the situation prior to 1948...
...Some refused to cooperate, and this time their punishment was severe...
...This was not the worst of it...
...The only problem arose over Novikoff's use of the Fifth Amendment, described in the report as a " regrettable practice...
...Brooklyn was ahotbed of Communist activity in the 1930s...
...Welker was aided by Chief Counsel Robert Morris, a tough interrogator with excellent contacts inside the FBI...
...The overriding factor, I think, is that Novikoff accepted the entire une...
...Did he express any misgivings about the party's "expert" analysis of every subject from biology to literature, from medicine to economic thought...
...Novikoff: Oh, yes, I mean I let you feel things here that I would protect myself from there...
...that he had not been a Communist since coming to UVM, though "he might have been [one] while at Brooklyn College...
...I? 1949 Novikoff accepted a position as professor of pathology at the University of Vermont Medical School...
...Sadly, he had nowhere to turn...
...In 1940 Grebanier testified before the Rapp-Coudert Committee of the New York State Legislature, which was investigating Communist influence in the city's public schools...
...He felt a loss of pride and a sense of compromised principles...
...Before long, he was taking classes at Columbia, working full-time as a lab instructor at Brooklyn College, and spending his summers in research at the prestigious Woods Hole Institute in Massachusetts...
...Novikoff refused to play...
...Novikoff had two choices...
...Despite his nightmare experience in Vermont, Novikof f somehow prevailed...
...The committee was impressed...
...His father, a self-styled Socialist, worked as a garment salesman on New York's Lower East Side...
...Novikoff felt no bitterness that day...
...Novikoff's reluctant testimony was protected by the Fifth Amendment...
...Though Novikoff survived the confrontation, some serious damage had been done...
...About half of the total Daily Worker subscriptions were sold in that borough alone...
...The mean-spirited Congressional inquisitors, the opportunistic Vermont politicians, the Red-baiting local newspapers, the fearful college administrators, the largely silent faculty—all served to undermine academic freedom in their own special way...
...He had come this far, and he was not ready to change his stance...
...He was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Sciences in 1974, the same year that his friend and scientific collaborator, Dr...
...Now we have a third entry that focuses on a single case, Stalking the Academic Communist: Intellectual Freedom and the Firing of A lex Novikoff (University Press of New England, 288 pp., $35.00...
...According to Holmes, these falsehoods "caused Novikoff great discomfort...
...The Cold War was heating up: Alger Hiss went on trial, Russia got the bomb, China fell to the Communists...
...It is even more definitely his duty as a professor...
...He was, after all, a Russian Jew from Brooklyn living in one of America's most rural, Protestant states...
...He hoped to find a rural area, far from radical politics, where he could continue his vital research on the growth of cancer cells in mice...
...With the aidof several Columbia professors, Novikoff entered the University's doctoral program in biology and quickly established himself as one of the department's top graduate students...
...Novikoff believed that bigotry played a key role in his troubles...
...Welker: Dr...
...The press lined up strongly against him...
...At UVM, meanwhile, Novikof f was developing a national reputation in the field of cancer research...
...He accepted his honor with grace and with tears...
...Refusal to do so, on whatever legal grounds, cannot fail to reflect upon a profession that claims for itself the fullest freedom to speak and the maximum protection of that freedom available in our society...
...did Novikoff refuse to cooperate...
...A public hearing was set for April 23...
...When Novikoff returned to Washington for the public hearing, Senator Welker pressed him again...
...and Cold War on Campus by Lionel Lewis, which explores the key role played by academic authorities of the era...
...He believed, correctly, that anti-Semitism played a role in these rejections and, according to Holmes, "he carried his bitterness for the rest of his life...
...I would say that the most important single factor [in leaving the Communist Party] was the experience in Wisconsin," he recalled, "where I was in a new life entirely, and I decided that this was the kind of life I would like to have, if I could have that choice...
...Those who resisted were fired...
...Christian de Duve, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine...
...Some of this fallout even reached the Ivory Tower...
...Significantly, the academic world did not rise up in protest...
...His account of one individual's struggle is also a study of academic freedom, academic politics and academic victims, of whom Novikoff is both a unique and a representative example...
...most of them, like Novikoff, were young and Jewish, overworked and underpaid...
...It would surely surface again...
...But this was only part of the story—a rather small part...
...Written by David Holmes, an associate professor of education at the University of Vermont (UVM), where Novikoff was a distinguished scientist, the book is far more ambitious than its title suggests...
...Novikoff's party name, "Norwood,' was widely known among faculty and students at the college...
...Coor...
...In 1946 Novikoff accepted a one-year fellowship in cancer research at the University of Wisconsin...
...From a legal standpoint, there was little the Jenner Committee could do to punish an uncooperative witness...
...The American Cancer Institute courageously continued his research grants and demanded that Novikoff—not the University of Vermont—keep the equipment he had purchased with the Institute's funds...
...There isn't...
...We do want to be assured," Emerson wrote to UVM President Carl Borgmann, "that everything is being done by the University authorities to see that the faculty is 100 per cent proAmerican and anti-Communist...
...Those were the rules of the game...
...Even at his lowest point, Novikoff was never entirely alone...
...A former Communist could only show his loyalty to the United States by cooperating with those who were now exposing Communists, said Welker...
...At Brooklyn College, Novikoff joined the Communist Party...
...His list of Communists included Alex Novikoff, who was subpoenaed by the committee in July 1941...
...When the professor insisted that he had severed all associations with the Communist Party before coming to Vermont, Morris was not impressed...
...While recognizing Novikoff's obvious value as a teacher and a scientist at UVM, the trustees were angered by his Fifth Amendment stand...
...He could not keep his job without testifying freely before the Jenner Committee, and he could not testify freely without suffering consequences more potentially damaging than the loss of his job...
...Public opinion was negative and intense...
...Desperate to keep his job, he alluded to his past in a series of carefully worded answers...
...His career took off...
...Away from the political world of New York City, he began to reassess his priorities...
...Can you tell me that...
...the hearing was chaired by Senator Herman Welker, an eccentric, hard-drinking Idaho Republican who modeled himself after Joe McCarthy...
...In the end, the committee recommended Novikoff's retention by a vote of 5-1...
...In 1983, Novikoff returned to Burlington to accept an honorary science degree from the same university that had dismissed him three decades before...
...He could truthfully answer the committee's questions and inform on others, or he could lie about his past...
...For Novikoff, quitting the Communist Party was not a moral decision—or even a difficult one...
...While others questioned and quit, he stayed loyal far too long...
...He was a scientist, and that, ultimately, was the life he lived.' David M. Oshinsky, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a professor of history at Rutgers University and author of A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy...
...The only country free of minority repression__" Novikoff seemed to believe this nonsense...
...Furthermore, Novikoff did not want a full airing of his long and detailed involvement in the CommunistParty...
...Both studies are impressively researched and national in scope, covering dozens of cases from New Jersey to California, from small junior colleges to Michigan, Rutgers and Yale...
...Potential allies, like the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Association of University Professors, either ignored him or offered token support...
...His extraordinary subsequent success was due to a combination of factors: persistence, ability, and plain good luck...
...This was vital testimony, for it corroborated the statements made by Bernard Grebanier a decade before...
...He did not believe that his former comrades at Brooklyn College were ever disloyal to the United States, and he resented the fact that his own loyalty should be measured by a willingness to expose them before Congressional inquisitors like Jenner and Welker...
...He took the Fifth Amendment on all questions relating to his political activities and associations prior to 1948...
...At Brooklyn College, more than 30 faculty members belonged to the party...
...He denied that he was a Communist, that he used the name "Norwood," and that he wrote for party publications...
...You have to take the sincerity of what I am saying...
...In addition, faculty members were expected to cooperate fully with the numerous legislative committees then investigating "subversive activities" in government, education, labor unions, and the like...
...Morris knew everything about Novikoff's past...
...Alex Novikoff, too, comes off properly as a political victim, not a political hero, although Holmes greatly admires him as a scientist and as a man...
...He's] made the most slanderous attacks," fumed one party organ...
...Was it simply a matter of honor, a refusal to save himself by offering up others to the Red-hunters...
...Faculty members at the University of California were required to pledge in writing that they were not Communists...
...Novikoff, how can this committee tell whether or not a man has severed his connections with the Communist Party unless he tells us all the truth...
...As the prestigious Association of American Universities declared: "If [a professor] is called upon to answer for his convictions, it is his duty as a citizen to speak out...
...In 1953 alone, the New York City Board of Education dismissed more than a dozen teachers and professors for taking the Fifth Amendment before "a duly constituted legislative committee...
...Much of Jenner's information came from the files of the Rapp-Coudert Committee and the FBI...
...Yet what the Committee did do was raise serious doubts about Novikoff's patriotism and then urge the community at large to mete out its own punishment...
...The Soviet Union, the only country in the world which makes anti-Semitism a crime punishable by death...
...What is missing, however, are the sorts of questions—and answers—that lead one from simple description to something more concrete...
...This informal sanction —known as "prescriptive publicity"—led to hundreds of dismissals and "blacklistings" during the McCarthy era...
...But all that changed in 1953 when the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Republican William E. Jenner of Indiana, a devoted McCarthyite, decided to investigate charges of Communist activity against teachers and professors in New York State...
...He testified in private session without an attorney...
...And later: "Question: [So] you've opened up your past much more widely to us than you did in Washington...
...Novikoff was trapped...
...Born in a small village near Kiev, Russia, Novikoff came to America as an infant in 1913...
...Novikoff chose to he...
...And President Borgmann, a thoroughly decent man, was not about to alienate the Governor and the Legislature at a time when his university was requesting the largest budget increase in its history...
...To the North, the University of Washington dismissed several tenured professors who refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliations and beliefs...
...As the favored son of the family, Alex attended school while his sister worked to help finance his education...
...The following day, Vermont's Republican Governor Lee Emerson demanded a "thorough investigation" of Novikoff by university officials, who immediately formed a committee of three professors and three trustees to look into the case...
...After several nasty exchanges with Morris and the committee members, Novikoff was sent home "to ponder whether he could be more forthcoming in the future...
...He dared to accuse the Soviet Union of antiSemitism...
...That fighting Irish Marine," said Welker of his hero, "would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needs it—except a dirty, lying, stinking Communist...
...It really didn't matter...
...In 1955, Albert Einstein used his influence to help Novikoff secure a research professorship at the newly established Einstein Medical College of Yeshiva University in New York City...
...We welcome you back," said President LattieF...
...In 1939 his friend Bernard Grebanier, a Brooklyn College English professor, left the party claiming that its hardcore members were "a band of conspirators" living in "a country as foreign as Abyssinia...
...In April 1953, Novikoff received his subpoena from the committee...
...Wesalute your integrity and courage...
...Led by Governor Emerson, an ex-officio board member, the majority issued a simple ultimatum: "Talk or walk...
...Novikoff had nothing to "ponder...
...This bleak story has been the subject of two recent books—No Ivory Tower by Ellen Schrecker, which views the purges largely through the eyes of the purged...
...Their mood was cordial, even sympathetic, and they did not put him under oath...
...The UVM committee met with Novikoff for more than five hours...
...I hope we understand each other, and all I can say to you, is that if you don't believe me, I don't want to stay...
...Unless Novikoff returned to Washington to answer all of the Jenner Committee's questions, he would be dismissed...
...There may be some truth to this perception, though gentile professors throughout the country were dismissed under similar circumstances...
...I was a leading figure, " he said in 1984, recalling his devotion to the Communist-dominated Teachers Union, his strenuous recruiting efforts, and his unsigned writings in the local Communist press...
...He replied that Novikoff must prove his "sincerity" by naming other Communists he had known at Brooklyn College...
...Novikoff agreed to compromise...
...How did he react to Stalin's bloody purges, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the ever-changing Communist line...
...In a sense," says Holmes, "his joining the party was a decision to join his friends.' Still, Novikoff was more active than the average party member...
...Bella Dodd, a former Communist official of the New York Teachers Union, was now a virulent anti-Communist who testified freely before the Jenner Committee and other such bodies...
...That meant answering all questions posed by the committees, including those about other people...
...In 1945 the FBI placed his name in its Security Index, where it would remain for more than a decade...
...That guy he'd kill...
...Almost alone among the academic victims of the McCarthy era, "Alex Novikoff survived, prospered, and eventually returned in honor to the scene of the darkest period of his life...
...The witnesses were familiar, although several of them had switched their political thinking over the years...
...Holmes' great strength is his ability to link Novikoff's story to the larger world beyond Burlington...
...Writers & Writing PRIDE AND PERJURY BY DAVID M. OSHINSKY During the McCarthy years, several hundred professors—including a few Communists and many former Communists—were hounded by Congressional committees, spied on by Federal authorities, harassed by patriotic groups, and fired by the universities where they worked despite the fact that many had tenure...
...In the following years, Novikoff published more than 300 papers in scientific journals, mostly on his cancer research...
...Among the witnesses who did cooperate, at least one named Novikoff as a Communist during his years at Brooklyn College...
...In answering these questions David Holmes takes a far more objerti ve—and realistic—view than those who automatically portray all Cold War victims as heroes...
...In response, the Communist press described Grebanier as a liar and a fascist stooge...
...Wanting desperately to become an officer, he was turned down by the Army, Navy and Air Corps on security grounds...
...As so often happened in that era, the full Board of Trustees rejected the (faculty-inspired) recommendation by an overwhelming vote...
...Grebanier named names...
...Unquestionably, his political activities were harmful to his life and work" the author says of Novikoff, who died in 1987...
Vol. 72 • September 1989 • No. 13
