The University in the McCarthy Era

To most present undergraduates the McCarthy era meant long afternoons at home after school spent in rapt if uncomprehending attention to the deep-voiced, dark-jowled man rasping out from a 12-inch television screen. For many, it was a time when parents' voices were lowered and heads shaken with resignation; only a few seniors today remember real personal tragedy and envisage clearly the scars caused by public persecution.

Indeed, from the perspective of the sixties, the whole period has an air of unreality; to students eager to advance civil rights through social action, the legalistic defense of established civil liberties seems a limited and rather foreign battle. They view the Wisconsin Senator and the climate he fomented and fed on as anaberration which could not have lasted. And, in days of sit-ins, summer projects, and full page ads criticizing U.S. foreign policy placed in the Times by hundreds of academics, they would have trouble understanding the years in the early fifties. Then tenured professors thought long and hard before risking a statement on public issues; teaching fellows, fearful of antagonizing Governing Boards, were politically inert; and students retreated into silence and inactivity. It was a time of villains, not heroes; those who stood against the witchhunt hysteria are little-remembered today.

The rise of "subversion" as an issue in the post-war decade has been interpreted by sociologists and political analysts in terms of groups reaction. The crisis atmosphere which prevailed, in varying degrees, from the Hiss investigation in 1948 to the Senate's censure of McCarthy in 1955 has been explained as the response of the United States to the new pressures of leadership in the cold war world; as the reaction of the nouveaux riches to the insecurity of constant acquisitiveness and precarious status; as the dislike by the remnants of the old Republican coalition (rural, midwest) for the New Deal generation and the Roosevelt coalition (urban, east); and as the hatred of the hyphenated Americans (the Italian-and German-Americans) for the second-class citizenship imposed upon them by World War II (by attaching Communism, the thesis holds, these immigrant groups not only gained revenge against a hated enemy of their home country but acquired needed prestige in America).

Joseph McCarthy, by no means the only man to exploit the nation's latent fears, gave the era his name since he, more than any one else, had, to borrow Richard Rovere's phrase, "surer, swifter access to the dark places of the American mind."

In 1953, the search for Communists extended to Harvard. The University, acting on a long tradition of academic freedom, held firm against the general craze to find subversive scapegoats and against the particular abuses of Senator McCarthy. Vital questions were thrust upon the University regarding the ambigious figure of Wendell H. Furry, associate professor of Physics, at a time of uncertainty caused by the resignation of President Conant. Harvard's action in the Furry case, its support of the scholar's right to political independence at a time when the national desire for blood letting was at its height, was a turning point in the defense war against the Congressional inquisitors.

The post-war "red scare" in education began unobtrusively in 1946 with the formation of the National Council for American Education, an organization that sought to "eradicate Socialism, Communism, and all forms of Marxism from the schools and colleges of America, and to stimulate sound American education." In keeping with these patriotic goals, the Council, in 1949, published a booklet entitled Red-Ucators at Harvard, listing subversive Harvard professors and the "Communist-Front" organizations to which they belonged. Crane Brinton, Howard Mumford Jones, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., Mark DeWolfe Howe, and John Kenneth Galbraith were all named. So was an associate professor of Physics, Wendell H. Furry.

The same year that Red-Ucators appeared, Alger Hiss went on trial in New York as a result of evidence gathered in an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hiss had graduated from Harvard Law School in the thirties, and while in Cambridge had been on the Law Review and a protege of Felix Frankfurter. When he went to Washington as a federal administrator, Hiss, like countless servants of the New Deal, symbolized Harvard to the nation. And, when he was convicted of perjury, the real charge in the public mind was espionage, and the University was viewed with suspicion as the "Kremlin on the Charles."

By the fall of 1952, Harvard's name had become almost synonymous with all that was evil in education. During the Presidential campaign, Senator McCarthy twice made nation-wide speeches (the last on election eve in which he castigated Harvard Faculty members who supported Stevenson, particularly Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., '38, then associate professor of History, and Archibald MacLeish, Boylston Professor of Racroric and Oratory. After the Eisenhower landslide, former Communist Granville Hicks, in testimony before the HUAC, gave an eyewitness' evidence that a cell of the Communist Party had indeed flourished at Harvard during the thirties. And within a week, Committee Chairman Harold Velde announced that his committee would postpone its investigations of defense installations, munitions labs, and Hollywood hanky-panky in order to "get the Reds" in higher education. Harvard, watering-spot for members of the Eastern Establishment and breeding-place for radicals and Jewish intellectuals, would be scrutinized with social seal.

In the early months of 1954, the Velde Committee began to seek out and identify Communists in education, supposedly as a prelude to proposing new internal security legislation. On February 25, the committee questioned Robert Gorham Davis '29, professor of English at Smith and teacher at Harvard from 1933 to 1943. Davis gave the HUAC he names of ten former and one present Harvard Faculty members who and been in a CP cell with him before the second World War. Wendell Furry was the one man still at Harvard named by Davis.

The following day, Furry made the first of four appearances before Congressional investigating committees find, although he denied that he was then a member of the Communist Party, he refused to answer all questions relating to previous CP activity. He justified his silence by the fifth amendment. That night Provost Paul H. Buck issued a statement: Professor Wendell H. Furry's reported refused to answer questions put to him by the House Committee on Un-American Activities will be given full and deliberate consideration by the Harvard University authorities."

The buro-speak concealed an urgent message: Harvard desperately needed time to untangle complex issues and formulate answers to crucial questions. The testimony and the inevitable increase of Congressional and public pressure had raised issues of academic freedom that were vital both to Harvard and to higher education across the country.

In abstract terms, academic freedom guards the liberties of a professor in two broad areas: his right within the academic community to pursue and promulgate truth without restrictions or censorship from the University Administration, and his right, in the public sphere, to enjoy the freedoms of association and expression which any citizen possesses. At the more of all issues of academic freedom the question of tenure; it is the safeguard which allows a professor to exercise his rights without fear of intimidation from either University or public officials.

In more concrete terms, the crisis facing Harvard during the Furry case revolved around the area of political independence and three questions raised by the spectre of Communism. Harvard was forced to decide whether would retain a teacher if he, first, was a Communist; second, had been a Communist; and, third, invoked the fifth amendment before congressional committees in order to keep his political affiliations private.

Although the Communist hunts posed unique problems for the University, Harvard was not without precedents which at least served as guidelines for decision-making. The most important of these was A. Lawrence Lowell's President's Report 1916-17 in which the president distinguished between "matters that fall within and those that lie outside the professor's field of study." Lowell assumed that the right of freedom in the classroom and laboratory was universally acknowledged and understood at the time; his concern, which the pro-German activities of some Faculty members had provided, was with a professor's political action. In the report, Lowell affirmed the professor's right to the "personal liberty of a citizen" and defended a teacher's freedom of expression and association.

Lowell had made a vital distinction and legitimized a professor's right to engage in political activity. But, of course, he could not have anticipated the particular problems posed by Communism over thirty years later. Even if one granted a professor the freedom to associate with with any group, didn't membership in the Communist party imply a loss of independence of mind, an adherence to a rigid, anti-American ideology, and therefore the impairment of a teacher's purely academic function?

This question had caused anxiety throughout the nation in the late forties, and in 1949 under pressure from anti-Communist groups (like the National Council for American Education), the National Education Association appointed a 20-man Educational Policies Commission, including President Conant and Dwight Eisenhower of Columbia, to examine the problem. The commission's conclusion was that "Communists should not be employed as teachers" because membership in the CP meant that they had surrendered their intellectual integrity. In a poll taken among Harvard Faculty members by the Crimson, this point of view was upheld, 218 to 108. Those critical of the commission report felt that a blanket rule should not be applied and that each individual should be judged separately according to his fitness to teach.

Nonetheless, the statement by the commission settled the first of the three questions relating to academic freedom and Communism: if a teacher was a Communist, he would be fired, whether he had tenure or not. But what if he had been a Communist or had taken the fifth amendment? When the Corporation met in March and April to decide the Furry case, a definite position on these matters had been taken by several influential members of the Harvard community, a position which might have been adopted as the University's policy.

In January, 1953, a month before Furry's appearance before the HUAC, Arthur Sutherland, professor of Law, and Zechariah Chafee, Jr., University Professor and a respected civil libertarian, issued a statement intended to clear up ambivalent aspects of the fifth amendment. In sum, they argued that it was "ill-advised" for witnesses to withhold testimony on grounds of self-incrimination in court or before legislative investigation committees. The professors felt the citizen "is neither morally nor legally justified in attempting political protest by standing silent when obligated to speak." Also ruled out as a motive for silence was a "sense of sportsmanship toward suspected associates." Only if the witness "was subjecting himself to some degree of danger of a criminal offense" would his reticence be justified.

The spirit of the Sutherland-Chafee statement was for nearly complete co-operation with the congressional committees, although their long, careful explanation made clear several reasons for using the fifth amendment, and colleges that were floundering in a slough of uncertainty eagerly embraced the statement as an answer to their confusion. In January, Rutgers fired two professors who had taken the fifth before the HUAC. The Sutherland-Chafee "doctrine" was used as justification.

A third distinguished voice also urged cooperation with the investigations. In January, 1953, President Conant was appointed U.S. High Commissioner of Germany and was questioned intensively before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At the time he stated that he thought professors who took the fifth should be fired. Several weeks later, speaking before his final Faculty meeting, Conant voiced a dislike for the investigations, and said that the University had no a priori policy regarding professors who appeared before congressional committees. Still, his comments before the Foreign Relations Committee and the Sutherland-Chafee statement would seem to have been all the precedent the University needed to fire Wendell Furry for his refusal to testify in February.

As it turned out, these precedents were not followed. In late May Harvard announced that it would retain Furry even though he had taken the fifth. Despite the massive framework of detail and technicalities which the University used to justify its position, the significance of the decision was broad and striking. Harvard had affirmed that it alone had the right to judge the fitness of its teachers and that no blanket rule could legitimately be used in deciding such a crucial question as whether a professor would retain his tenure. Harvard's action reversed a trend which had been the cause of growing friction between faculties and administrations across the country and had resulted in feelings of fear and impotence among the nation's professors. The University's decision also helped to check the very real, if unspoken, influence of Congress over the educational policy of the nation's universities since it courageously reiterated President Lowell's dictum on political independence before a hostile audience.

If the University's decision in the Furry case was of great significance, it is important to understand how the policy was determined and why the point of view of Conant, Sutherland, and Chafee was modified. This is especially intriguing since at one point during the deliberations Furry's connection with Harvard was nearly severed.

To understand the Furry decision it is necessary first to remember the unusual administrative set-up which Conant's departure and the impending Congressional investigations necessitated. The leadership of the University had fallen to Paul Buck, who, as provost and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was given the job as chairman or a special administrative committee to assume the President's duties. This committee was composed of Dr. Roger I. Lee and Charles A. Coolidge, Fellows of Harvard College, and Paul Cabot, the University Treasurer. The other important ad hoc group was an Advisory Committee of the Faculty appointed by Buck in early February. Members of this committee were: Buck, who acted as chairman; George Baker, professor of Business Administration; Mason Hammond, Pope Professor of Latin Language and Literature; Erwin Griswold, Dean of the Law School; and Edward Purcell, professor of Physics.

The key body in the Furry case was the Corporation. With Conant gone, Buck, as Provost and Dean, had become, more than ever, the Faculty's representative to to the Corporation. And it would be the five Fellows--Lee, Coolidge, William Marbury, R. Keith Kane, and Thomas Lamont (in descending order of seniority)--and Cabot who would make the final determination about Furry.

In fact, to reduce the issue to schematic terms, it was a matter of Buck trying to persuade Coolidge. Each man had varying traditions and forces influencing him, but broadly speaking Buck was for defending Furry, and Coolidge (and the Corporation) was initially unsure. It is the explanation of what caused the Corporation, Harvard's rich, conservative, remote administrators, to act in defense of a radical associate professor of Physics on the unfamiliar field of free speech which makes the case so fascinating.

In a very real sense, Charles A. Coolidge spoke for the fellows. R.I. Lee, the Senior Fellow, may have been senile, often dozing during the Corporation's debates, and leadership fell to Coolidge. Thomas Lamont and R. Keith Kane were newly appointed members and naturally deferred to the experience of the Acting Senior Fellow. Only William Marbury could approach Coolidge's longevity, and although he and Coolidge comprised the Corporation's Special Committee to study the Fury Case, he seems to have followed his colleague's lead. A descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison (1803), Marbury was a Baltimore lawyer and personal friend of Alger Hiss. In fact, one reason for his unsureness in the Furry case was a disappointment with the outcome of Hiss's trial and a belief that the convicted perjurer had lied even to his closest friends. Such a view made him suspicious towards other leftists, including Furry.

Therefore, it was to be Coolidge, if anyone, who would swing the Fellows of the Corporation behind Buck in support of Furry. Son of an old Boston family, First Marshal of his class, Coolidge had graduated from Harvard Law School and entered the prestigious Federal Street firm of Ropes and Gray. Acting as head of the Fellows in place of the incapacitated Dr. Lee, he was responsible for all of the Corporation's official announcements as well as the ultimate form of its policy.

During March and April the Corporation reviewed Furry's testimony before the Velde Committee and attempted to set University policy. In this period three other matters impinged upon their deliberations. At the end of March the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security came to Boston and interrogated more members of the Harvard faculty. When18PAUL BUCK