Red In The Face

When the members of the Class of 1955 received their diplomas, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s public accusations of communist infiltration at Harvard had faded, but questions of academic freedom still cast their shadows over Harvard Yard.

For the Class’ most politically engaged students, the Wisconsin senator’s attacks had proved a decisive event in their college careers.

Stanley N. Katz ’55, who now teaches public and international affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, recalls that the reverberations of the Red Scare tinted certain students’ college experiences a different shade of crimson.

“I was a member of the Harvard Liberal Union, a left-wing political organization,” he says. “I can remember as a freshman being warned that, if you were a member, you were unlikely ever to get a job in the government.”

While McCarthy’s accusations may have sparked students to think twice about their political affiliations, his claims weighed more heavily on members of the faculty, some of whom were brought before congressional committees to respond to allegations of communist ties.

“In terms of academic freedom, we thought it was a threat because our professors were being brought to trial,” Katz says.

And yet, for many students, college life went on as usual in the early 1950s.

“As far as the day-to-day life of business, one didn’t feel the reverberations very much,” recalls Walter Goffart ’55, who now teaches history at Yale. “It’s very different, reading history books and actually being there.”

At times, however, the national surge of red-baiting unexpectedly crept its way into student affairs.

During his freshman year, Arthur J. Langguth, Jr. ’55 sent a letter to his parents and jokingly labeled his return address “the Communist Party Headquarters at Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

When his parents received the letter, it had been opened and inspected by government officials.

“I realized very quickly that this wasn’t just a big joke,” says Langguth, who later became Crimson president.

The Class of 1955 had attended Harvard during the height of McCarthy’s influence. Though the senator was censured in late 1954, the specter of McCarthyism lingered even as students made their way out of Harvard Yard.

“By the time we graduated,” Langguth says, “it was still in the air.”

PRIMARY COLOR

As Cold War tensions rose in the late 1940s and early 1950s, fears of communism surged across the United States, and the nation’s university campuses were no exception.

In 1952, two congressional committees set out to investigate communist influences in academia.

Harvard in particular came under fire, and its reputation for a liberal-leaning faculty earned it the moniker “the Kremlin on the Charles.”

“Harvard would always be targeted because it’s a signature place,” says David L. Halberstam ’55, a former Crimson managing editor who went on to become a prominent journalist and author.

Indeed, by the spring of 1953, McCarthy’s movement turned its focus toward Cambridge after Robert G. Davies ’29 gave testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Davies, who had taught at Harvard in the 1930s, said that he and 15 other faculty members had been a part of a communist cell.

Among the names Davies disclosed was that of Associate Professor of Physics Wendell H. Furry, who was still teaching at Harvard in 1953.

Furry appeared before the HUAC in February and April and stated that he was not currently a member of the Communist Party. But, when questioned about his activities before 1951, he pled the Fifth Amendment—remaining silent rather than disclosing his affiliation with the Party while he worked as an MIT research associate during World War II.

“It is my strong feeling that the Committee’s policy of interrogating persons on their private beliefs and associations is utterly inconsistent with American traditions of freedom,” Furry told the press in February 1953.

Meanwhile, other faculty members—including Helen Deane Markham, assistant professor of anatomy, and Leon J. Kamin ’48, a teaching fellow in the Social Relations department—also pled the Fifth in their testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

After a detailed analysis, the Harvard Corporation—the University’s highest governing body—concluded in May that Furry and Kamin were no longer affiliated with the Communist Party and that Markham had never been a member. They would keep all three accused faculty members.

The move shocked the nation’s ardent anti-communists, but met with approval from most of the Harvard faculty.

“Virtually every professor contacted yesterday called the decision ‘courageous’ and ‘wise,’” The Crimson reported at the time.

Still, the accused Kamin was not reappointed at the end of the academic year and went on to face a subpoena from McCarthy’s committee in early 1954.

Kamin met with then-Dean of the Faculty McGeorge Bundy shortly before the hearing.

He describes the meeting in a letter published in the New York Review of Books in February 2005. “He urged me to do my civic duty, and to name names,” Kamin writes, adding that he also learned that Bundy was in regular contact with the Boston office of the FBI and that he had had advance knowledge of Kamin’s subpoena by McCarthy’s committee.

“I was a little surprised to learn that he was in such close contact with the FBI. I wasn’t surprised that he would take the basic point of view that he did,” Kamin says in an interview.

The teaching fellow moved to Canada for 14 years before returning to the U.S. and came to the conclusion in his letter that “Harvard’s reputation as a bastion of academic freedom in the dark days of McCarthyism is wholly undeserved.”

Langguth echoes Kamin’s skepticism.

“In retrospect, we find that Harvard didn’t do as much to protect its junior faculty as they could have,” he says. “A few young faculty members were sacrificed on the altar of McCarthyism.”

A PRESIDENTIAL AFFAIR

Nathan M. Pusey ’28 took the reins of the University in the fall of 1953.

Hailing from the same Wisconsin town as McCarthy, Pusey was no stranger to his tactics. While president of Lawrence College in Wisconsin, Pusey publicly tangled with the senator during his bid for reelection. McCarthy, in turn, derided Harvard’s new president as “a rabid anti-anti-communist.”

A classics scholar, Pusey brought to the job a distinctly different style from his predecessor, James B. Conant ’14, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project with the goal of strengthening national security.

“Conant really didn’t think that somebody who took the Fifth Amendment deserved to be kept on, and said so,” Morton Keller, co-author of “Making Harvard Modern,” told The Crimson in 2004. “Pusey, who had clashed with McCarthy in Wisconsin...was stronger on academic freedom than Conant was.”

In late 1953, Pusey declared at a press conference that no known communists were on the faculty and defended Furry, denying that the physics professor was a current member of the Party or “sought to indoctrinate his students.”

While Pusey made efforts to shield some faculty members from McCarthy’s charges, students like Katz saw holes in the president’s strategy.

“President Pusey...came to a dinner at Dunster House, and I asked him if Harvard would hire a communist to be a professor. He said, ‘No, because communists are committed to a closed intellectual system,’” Katz recalls. “I then asked him if he would refuse to hire Jesuits, and the House Master cut off the discussion.”

SEEING CRIMSON

While House Masters may have stifled discussion, students attempted to keep the conversation going in print.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, The Crimson came to stand out from the ranks of most university newspapers for its coverage of McCarthy’s communist hunts and other questions of academic freedom.

In the spring of 1949, The Crimson published its first supplement on academic freedom, assembling an annual compendium of major cases both at Harvard and across the nation.

“The academic freedom issue...began at a time when The Crimson and the College still contained a number of World War II veterans,” recalls Jack Rosenthal ’56, a former associate managing editor of The Crimson. “They were more mature and more sophisticated than a lot of typical undergraduates. When these kinds of chauvinistic attacks started arising, they were deeply concerned.”

Though several Crimson editors at the time were deeply engaged in questions of academic freedom, few became as entrenched as J. Anthony Lukas ’55.

Lukas, whose father was a member of the American Jewish Committee and an outspoken critic of McCarthy, arrived on campus as a freshman with the senator’s home phone number in his pocket.

Lukas spoke regularly with McCarthy, who often began their interviews saying, “Now, Tony, how are you? How are all those pinkos up at Harvard?”

Lukas, who later became associate managing editor, arranged conference calls so that The Crimson’s top editors could also speak with McCarthy.

Many of Lukas’ colleagues were impressed by the seemingly casual nature of his conversations with the senator.

“We heard all this ‘Tony-Joe’ stuff, and it was really amazing,” Halberstam recalls.

In 1954, the Associated Press picked up a 4,000-word feature that Lukas had written for The Crimson discussing Furry’s communist ties and the fallout from his affiliation.

As Rosenthal notes, the events of the early 1950s had a particularly profound effect on some Crimson editors.

“It was one of the reasons that many of us at The Crimson became journalists, because we wanted to stand up for often defenseless faculty-types who weren’t very politically sophisticated and who were under a huge public spotlight, rightly and wrongly,” says Rosenthal.

Five members of the Class of 1955 went on to win Pulitzer Prizes. Lukas won two Pulitzers before his death in 1997, and Halberstam picked up one for his coverage of the Vietnam War.

In 1954, the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings helped turn public opinion against McCarthy, leading to the Senate’s formal condemnation of him at the end of the year. As McCarthy’s influence waned, fears of communist infiltration lost their salience at Harvard and across the country.

“With the breaking of the McCarthy bubble, things had calmed down quite a bit,” says Rosenthal, who helped assemble The Crimson’s academic freedom supplement in 1955. “It was still an issue, but it didn’t have anything like the fervor or the power it had had in the two or three years previous.”

Rosenthal adds that most undergraduates “didn’t much care” about the battles over academic freedom that were being waged in Cambridge and Washington. “They were much more concerned with being undergraduates and were not very politically involved,” he says.

Halberstam notes that political activism on college campuses began to shift toward issues that would become trademarks of the 1960s and early 1970s.

“By the time we graduated, Ike had been elected, and there wasn’t as much political value to it for the Republicans,” Halberstam says. “Academic freedom was soon to be replaced as the top campus issue by civil rights and, some years later, by Vietnam.”

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard. edu.