Lyons Denies Entire Chicago Tribune Ivy League 'Smear'

Curator of the Nieman Foundation Louis M. Lyons '20, retorted sharply in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly to the charges Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Tribune has been directing against the Ivy League for the past year.

"The Tribune with its slanted and twisted news stands out as an obsolete anomaly in an era of responsible journalism," Lyons wrote.

Eugene Griflin, Tribune reporter, launched the "crusade" against Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth one year ago today with the alarming news that Ivy League colleges are "infested with pedagogic termites of communism, socialism, world federalism and other foreign born schemes which would weaken the American Republic."

Charges Distortion

Lyons charged the Chicago paper with indiscriminate reporting and distorted stories. He challenged the right of the Tribune to attack the Americanism of Harvard and Dartmouth, when during the war President Conant directed the Atomic research, and Dartmouth's President John Sloan Dickey served with the state department.

In his series of articles, Griflin included Professors Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38, Kirtley F. Mather, and Harlow Shapley among these at "Harvard . . . noted in the east for its stable of professors who frequently come out from behind their books to toe the communist party line, perhaps absent mindedly." Lyons produces evidence such as the anti-communist articles Professor Schlesinger has written for Henry Luce to spotlight the absurdity of the Tribune's assertions. In another article headlined "Red Teaching at Harvard is Insidious" the Tribune attacked Granville Hicks '23 and Felix Frankfurter '06, neither of whom as Lyons points out, have been at Harvard for ten years.