Fighting Paranoia, Defending Faith

In his Baccalaureate address to the Class of 1954—his first as Harvard’s president—Nathan M. Pusey ’28 focused on “the attitude of reverence” that he believed was central to the University.

“Keep an open mind on the subject of religion, and as time goes on, give it an increasing place in your lives,” Pusey told the assembled senior class, adding that he hoped the students would make Memorial Church their “symbol of Harvard” after they had departed from the ivy-covered gates.

Pusey’s speech reflected the tone of his first year as University President, a year in which he emphasized the importance of faith and embarked on a mission to resurrect the struggling Divinity School.

At the same time, Harvard’s leader was also thrust into the public spotlight as an old foe of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R.-Wisc., defending his faculty’s academic freedom as McCarthy and other politicians targeted institutions of higher education for harboring suspected communists.

According to Time magazine, when Pusey had been selected as Harvard’s 24th president, students responded to the news with rhyming chants of “Pusey? Pusey? Who’s he? Who’s he?”

“He was an apparent nobody, plucked out of nowhere, who had never even written a book,” Time wrote in its March 1954 profile of Pusey, an Iowa native, president of tiny Lawrence College in Wisconsin, and first non-New Englander to lead Harvard.

But by the end of his first year, this “apparent nobody” had become somebody, taking on significant roles within the University—as an advocate for the Divinity School—and in a wider realm, becoming what Time magazine called “senior defense counsel to the academic world” against McCarthy’s prosecution of suspected communists.

SEEING RED

While Pusey’s name may not have been well-known to the students at Harvard, it was familiar to McCarthy. He and Pusey were both natives of Appleton, Wis., and Pusey had signed a pamphlet criticizing the senator during his campaign for re-election.

After Harvard announced its new president, McCarthy declared that his state would be glad to get rid of a “rabid anti anti-Communist” such as Pusey.

“Harvard’s loss is Wisconsin’s gain,” the senator told the Boston Traveler in a letter reprinted in newspapers across the country under the headline “Pusey vs. McCarthy.”

Pusey brought with him to Cambridge this reputation as a McCarthy opponent, at a time when Harvard had taken center stage in the congressional investigations of communist activity at universities.

In the spring of 1953, three Harvard faculty members, including Associate Professor of Physics Wendell H. Furry, were called before Congress to testify about their ties to the Communist Party, and all three invoked their Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions.

In the eyes of Pusey’s predecessor, James B. Conant ’14, pleading the Fifth was tantamount to an admission of guilt, and many universities had dismissed faculty members who remained silent under questioning.

But the Harvard Corporation decided to keep all three faculty members, concluding that none of them were currently members of the Communist Party.

As Pusey took office, McCarthy kept up his public tirades against Harvard—which had a reputation as the “Kremlin on the Charles”—and urged the University to fire Furry.

But Pusey, a classics scholar, did not share the views of his national security-minded predecessor, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project.

“Conant really didn’t think that somebody who took the Fifth Amendment deserved to be kept on, and said so,” says Brandeis historian Morton Keller, co-author of the book Making Harvard Modern. “Pusey, who had clashed with McCarthy in Wisconsin, knew pretty much who he was, and I think by the standards of the time was stronger on academic freedom than Conant was.”

In November, McCarthy sent a telegram to Pusey demanding to know how the University would act on Furry’s case.

Pusey pledged in a press conference that the University was “absolutely, unalterably and finally opposed to communism” and that no known communists were on the faculty. But he defended Furry against the charges that he was a current member of the party or “sought to indoctrinate his students.”

In a speech before the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools the following month, Pusey condemned those who continued to target Harvard, noting that no one on the faculty had been proven a communist.

“And yet some unfriendly critics continue to belabor us with the name of one single teacher who was a communist, seeking thereby to create the impression or perhaps mistakenly believing that we are a seat for widespread disloyalty,” Pusey said.

As Harvard remained under fire in Washington for its alleged communist ties, many student groups on campus backed Pusey’s stance against McCarthy.

“[McCarthy] was doggedly continuing his fight against subversion, with methods about which many were becoming increasingly skeptical,” the editors of the 1954 yearbook wrote in their retrospective.

Pusey did not receive unanimous support. One group of students attempted to form the Harvard Conservative League, an organization dedicated to rooting out communists on campus.

“The student body, or at least a small part of it, is refusing to sit by and watch this University harbor, indeed foster these enemies of our country,” the students wrote in a statement.

But some prospective members distanced themselves from the club’s original mission, and the Office of the Dean of the College said it would not approve a group that advocated spy tactics and investigations of faculty members.

DIVINE INTERVENTION

As Pusey engaged in his public debates with McCarthy, the new Harvard president, a devout Episcopalian, also focused on an issue nearer to his heart.

Several weeks before his inauguration, Pusey became the first leader since 1909 to participate in an exercise at the Divinity School, speaking on the school’s role within the University at the opening convocation ceremonies in Andover Chapel on September 30, 1953.

Criticizing the “present low estate of religion at Harvard,” Pusey called for a renewed focus on theological studies.

“It is leadership in religious knowledge, and even more, in religious experience—not increased industrial might, not more research facilities, certainly not these things by themselves—of which we now have a most gaping need,” Pusey said.

The speech drew praise from the official Catholic newspaper in Boston, which had not looked favorably on the secular Conant and was glad to see the new Harvard leader calling for a “revival of spiritual interests.”

Pusey’s words were “courageous in an environment so long foreign to their expression,” the editors of the Boston Pilot wrote.

A group of Divinity School students agreed, writing in an Oct. 7 statement to The Crimson that Pusey’s focus on the theological school was “a welcome change after the inattention received during the Conant regime.”

Pusey’s speech came in the midst of a Divinity School fundraising campaign to bring new life to the institution, which carried on Harvard’s traditional role as an institute of religious instruction and had existed as a separate school within the University since 1816.

In their statement, the Divinity School students echoed Pusey’s sentiment that the school’s reputation had suffered in recent years, though they said they thought it was undeserved.

“It is possibly easier to get into the Divinity School than most other schools in the University, but it is not easier to get a degree,” the students wrote. “The belief common around the University that educational standards here are low is nothing but a myth.”

In his attempt to improve the reputation of the school, Pusey faced two major challenges: raising the necessary money and selecting a new dean to replace Willard L. Sperry, who had retired in January 1953.

By a January 1954 deadline the school had raised less than half of the $2 million goal.

Pusey extended the deadline, but stressed that the money would only be used to set the school on a firmer foundation, and that it would eventually have to support itself like all of Harvard’s other graduate schools.

As part of its plan to be self-supporting and fund its expanded programs, the leaders of the Divinity School announced in November that the $150 tuition would increase after several years of running large deficits.

The school’s financial state also improved thanks to a high-profile $1 million gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in January 1954, which Acting Dean George H. Williams said led to “an avalanche” of donations.

In a letter to Pusey announcing his donation, Rockefeller praised the president’s leadership on religious issues.

“Your profound belief in the underlying importance of the spiritual life promises to have far-reaching influence on education in this country,” Rockefeller wrote. “That one of your first concerns in accepting the presidency of Harvard University is the development of a strong and effective Divinity School further emphasized the strength of your belief.”

As Rockefeller’s gift brought the school closer to its fundraising goal, the search for a new leader dragged on until the following year.

In April 1955, over two years after Sperry’s retirement, Pusey announced the selection of Douglas Horton, Minister of the General Council of Congregational Churches, as the new dean. With a background in a movement committed to promoting unity among different Christian denominations, Horton fit in with Pusey’s vision for a Divinity School faculty that represented a greater diversity of religious traditions.

‘REVIVAL OF RELIGION’

Pusey said that his personal faith, weak while an undergraduate here, strengthened after graduation.

In November 1953, Pusey told students at Congregational Church that he himself had not been interested in religion as a student, believing it was “a kind of ancient superstition no longer needed and holding back progress.”

But as President, he emphasized that theology had earned a place in his own life and fit into his vision for higher education.

“Living and practicing religion must supplement the mere studying and reading about it,” he said.

According to an April 1954 Crimson report on religion at Harvard, some students were concerned that the devout Pusey might try to impose his own views on the University, but these fears were allayed by his willingness to let individuals dictate their own involvement.

“Students and faculty alike were at first afraid that Pusey might attempt to reestablish compulsory chapel or assembly similar to that which [was] conducted at Lawrence,” The Crimson wrote. “[H]e has made clear that he is not interested in compulsion or revivalism in the prayer-meeting sense. But he is intensely interested in providing facilities for religious study and participation for those who want them.”

Historian Keller says he does not believe Pusey’s own beliefs influenced his decisions as president, arguing that Pusey’s legacy rests in his work to make Harvard a more meritocratic institution.

“I would say for the most part if you look at his presidency there’s not much reflection of his religiosity in it,” Keller says. “He understood that his job was to see to it that Harvard got the resources to be a great university, and that’s what he worked on. It was as though there were two sides to him, the University president and then the person with his own beliefs, and he kept them pretty well separate.”

While Pusey’s decisions throughout his tenure—including his willingness to hire Jews to the Faculty—reflected this separation between his personal views and his official stances, his first year also marked a time of increased religious interest on campus, as membership in religious organizations rose and more students attended local churches.

“There are all sorts of explanations, vague ones like ‘the religious tenor of the times,’ specific ones such as the example set by the personal devotion of President Pusey,” The Crimson wrote in an October 1953 editorial. “But regardless of cause, a revival is in the offing.”

Before Pusey took office, the future of the Divinity School had been uncertain, as the increased emphasis on preserving Harvard’s non-sectarian identity and devoting resources to scientific study had led some of the University’s leaders to wonder if the school was a relic of the past that should be eliminated.

While Pusey did not solely focus on the Divinity School at the expense of other graduate schools, his early commitment to theological studies made it clear that the University would not take the route of shutting the school down.

The president may have begun the year as an unknown, but the yearbook editors wrote that his religious views “were, by the end of the year, well-known to all.”

And in a year when, as the editors wrote, “above all else loomed the issue of McCarthy, the senator and the ism,” Pusey emphasized adopting a faith appropriate to the realities of the twentieth century.

In his address at the Divinity School, Pusey said, “Let me state as a personal conviction that though our predecessors in President Eliot’s generation were unquestionably men of great faith, their faith will not do for us, if for no other reason, because events of the Twentieth Century have made its easy optimism unpalatable.

“It is not that we do not have faith, but that certainty escapes us, and that all things have been brought into doubt; that fearing to be victimized, we are inclined not to believe at all.”

And yet, he continued, “Churches and creeds and metaphysical complexities persist, and we have need of them still.”

—Staff writer Jessica R. Rubin-Wills can be reached at rubinwil@fas.harvard.edu.