McCarthyism Research Articles

McCarthyism and the Court: The Need for “an uncommon portion of fortitude in the judges”

McCarthyism and the Court: The Need for “an uncommon portion of fortitude in the judges” ROBERT M. LICHTMAN American history is punctuated by periods of political repression, invariably the product of wars or national crises. Among these are the period of the Sedition Act of 1798 (when President John Adams’ administration, on the verge of war with France, prosecuted and imprisoned Jeffer­ sonian critics); the Civil War period (when President Abraham Lincoln suspended ha­ beas corpus and the government tried persons deemed disloyal by court-martial); the World War I period (when individuals who spoke against the war werejailed under espionage and sedition statutes); World War II (when over 100,000 Japanese on the West Coast, the vast majority American citizens, were interned without charges or hearing); and the McCarthy era (by far the longest of the episodes, when a wide range of repres­ sive measures was directed at Communists and “subversives”).1 This country. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. observed in a 1987 address, “has a long history of failing to preserve civil liberties when it perceived its national security threatened.” “After each perceived security crisis ended,” he added, “the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary.”2 Political repression in America is majoritarian , administered by elected officials and supported by public opinion. As a conse­ quence, if the Supreme Court in a time of repression frustrates the government’s goals by deciding cases in favor of targeted groups or individuals, it risks attack by the Congress, the press, and the public at large. This risk was foreseen by the Founders when they provided lifetime tenure for federal judges. Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, No. 78, found it “easy to see that it would require an uncommon portion of fortitude in the judges to do their duty as faithful guardians of the Constitution, where legislative invasions of it had been instigated by the major voice of the community.”3 108 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY The Court, however, is not necessarily under attack in a time of political repression, for it may acquiesce in repressive measures. An accommodating Court does not invite attack. The clearest example is the World War I period. In 1919 and 1920, the Court issued a string of decisions in criminal prosecutions against individuals whose only crime was disseminating anti-war views in speeches or written materials—every decision in the government’s favor. The World War I decisions, Harry Kalven wrote, are “dismal evidence of the degree to which the mood of society penetrates judicial chambers.” Con­ comitantly, public criticism of the Court was at a low ebb.4 The Court’s McCarthy era, which (in this reading) spanned the October 1949 through October 1961 Terms—during which it issued roughly one hundred decisions in “Commu­ nist” cases—began with a period in which it largely acquiesced in repressive measures. In the 1955 and 1956 Terms, however, it issued a number of decisions in favor of accused Communists that triggered harsh attacks upon the Court. Critics accused it of aiding Communist “subversion” and questioned the Justices’ patriotism and competence. Scores of anti-Court bills were introduced in Congress.5 Aware of public opinion, the Court employed an assortment of defensive strate­ gies. When ruling against the government, it evaded constitutional issues, deciding on narrow, this-case-only grounds. It repeatedly postponed decision in major cases. It upheld the constitutionality of a key sedition statute but interpreted it as imposing a formidable burden of proof upon the government. And, when enactment of anti-Court legislation was close at hand, it retreated, deciding new cases in the government’s favor and distinguishing, substantially nullifying, earlier contrary decisions. This article traces the course of the Court’s decisions in McCarthy-era “Commu­ nist” cases, the attacks upon it and the antiCourt legislation in the Congress, and the Court’s response. In October 1949, when a heavy flow of “Communist” cases first began to reach the Court, Fred M. Vinson was ChiefJustice. He, along with three other Truman appointees, Harold H. Burton, Tom C. Clark, and Sherman Minton, and a Roosevelt appointee, Stanley F. Reed, comprised a five-justice conservative majority...

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky We have a particularly appetizing buffet for our readers in this issue, and as I often say, they illustratetherich varietyofSupreme Court history. Althoughthetraditional cases are atthe heartoftwo ofthearticles, the storiestoldby the authors go far beyond the four comers of the opinions. This well reflects what one is finding in many recent books about the Court, the Justices, and their work, attention not only to thewritten opinion, butwhatLouis D. Brandeis used to call “all the facts that surround.” Williamjames Hoffer’s article on the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is not the first, nor will it be the last, historical word on that subject. ButPlessy, decided more than a century ago, continues to fascinate scholars as we leam more about the people involvedinthecase. Hoffertakes a close lookat the lawyering involved, and the strategy that brought the case to the high court. Since the Court does not issue advisory opinions, there mustbe a real case orcontroversy involved, and the people who objected to the Louisiana law segregating railroad cars chose carefully, not just Homer Plessy, but the lawyers and the tactics they would follow. Thomas Healy, a colleague of Hoffer’s at Seton Hall University, also revisits another landmark decision, Abrams r. United States (1919). The article is adopted from Healy’s recent book, and focuses on why Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., changed his mind regard­ ing the meaning ofthe FirstAmendment Speech Clause from his decision only a few months earlier in Schenck v. UnitedStates. Again, much has been written on the Holmes dissent, but Healy unearths new information that led Holmes to write what has been considered one of the great defenses of free speech. There is much debate over the process by which men and women are nominated to the federal judiciary. One school ofthought takes a rather purist view that if the person is qualified (and what that means is the subject of another book), then the Senate ought to confirm. History, however, teaches us that as great—perhaps even a greater—a consideration is politics, not only the political debates over hot button issues, but also old-fashioned party politics. This was as true in the days ofthe early Republic as it is now. Lest anyone think that some ofthe recent fights over nominations are something new, v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Albert Lawrence ofNew York’s Empire State College examines the politics involving an open seat on the high court, President Grover Cleveland, and two New York lawyers who happened to be brothers—Wheeler and Rufus Peckham. While the political goals may have changed since Tammany tried to manipulate the process, political reasons still play a large role in who gets on the Bench. When writing about the Court, historians always note that, in times of stress, especially when national security issues seem to be involved, the Court has often backed away from its role as protector ofindividual liberties. This is not surprising. The men, and more recently women, who have sat on the bench are subject to the same emotions as their fellow citizens when there is a perceived threat to the country. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., observed in 1987 that the Court and the country “has a long history of failing to preserve civil liberties when it perceived its national security threatened.” One of the worst episodes of this failure occurred after the Second World War, in the nearly decade-long McCarthy era. Robert Lichtman, a San Francisco attorney and author, looks at the Court during these years, tracing how the Justices, like the countiy, engaged in the witch hunt, and eventually came out of its madness. One of the continuing debates among scholars as well as politicians and judicial observers in general is that of “judicial activism” versus “judicial restraint.” There are some who consider this at best a fallacious argument, since what constitutes “activism” and “restraint” are relative values very much in the eye of the beholder. Without the activism ofthe Warren Court, for example, it is hard to believe that the southern states would have voluntarily dismantled segregation. On the other hand, a too rigid adherence to the “idol of restraint,” as Zachary...

Gerald Edward Brown

Gerald Edward Brown

Bowing to the Right: Red Scare Politics in the McCarthy Era

Bowing to the Right: Red Scare Politics in the McCarthy Era

Aaron Copland: Fanfare for America by Andreas Skipis (review)

Reviewed by: Aaron Copland: Fanfare for America by Andreas Skipis John Clark Aaron Copland: Fanfare for America. DVD. A film by Andreas Skipis. [Halle/Saale, Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2011, 2001. 101 573. $28.98. This 2001 production by Hessischer Rund funk for Arthaus Musik presents an interesting overview of the career of Aaron Copland. By no means an exhaustive account, it gives what is a generally good cross section of his life and works, with many archival television clips and photographs, as well as a present-day tour through the Brooklyn of his early years. With a running time of only an hour, this film leaps from peak to peak, concentrating on the years from Copland’s study in Paris in the 1920’s to his serial pieces Twelve Poems of Emily Dickenson (1951) and Connotations, commissioned for the opening of Lincoln Center in 1962. The narration of the film is in German, although the menu presents an option of subtitles in English as well as several other languages, but the interviews (with conductor Hugh Wolff, biographer Howard Pollack and Copland himself) are in [End Page 166] English. By limiting the talking heads, director Andreas Skipis actually achieves more unity and structural coherence than might be expected from such a short film. Copland is presented in interviews done towards the end of his professional life (presumably in the 1970’s and early 80’s, although information for this is not given) and is compelling in his discussion of his music and life - especially his Zen-like acceptance of the difficulties he encountered in the McCarthy era congressional hearings. Wolff is lucid and engaging in his discussions of the music he conducts, although the sometimes bizarre film style gets in the way. Initially, I thought I was watching some very modestly gifted actors imitating symphonic musicians playing Copland’s music, but they are indeed Wolff leading the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra (shortly to change its name to Hessischer Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester). Why film-makers and television directors feel these community theater histrionics make Classical music more accessible is a question for future generations. Once one gets by, for example, the oddity of the rapidly appearing and disappearing soloists in Music for the Theater (1925) in front of a single music stand in an all-white room, one can appreciate the beautiful performance. A composer and pianist in his own right, Howard Pollack is responsible for the definitive biography of Copland (Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, University of Illinois Press, 1999) and here provides insights that go well beyond the merely biographical. The shortcomings of his contributions are that he is interviewed on the New York subway (apparently during rush hour, with all the attendant noise) and walking down a busy street - two more strange filmic conceits. Pollack’s musical analysis (given on a large scale in reference to Copland’s entire career) is extremely insightful and present Copland’s integrated ideas of music, politics and life in general. Musically, the film is focused on the performances by Wolff and the Frankfurt Symphony, but the DVD case includes pictures of live performances with Benny Goodman, Leonard Bernstein and Martha Graham - none of which lasts more than a minute or two or can stand on its own as a musical statement. In general, the musical interludes are well spaced and present a good chronological overview of Copland’s work, with the single exception of his Concerto for Clarinet and String Orchestra (1948) with Goodman, which is presented as a development of his interest in the Jazz of the 1920’s (which inspired his Music for the Theater). The work by Wolff and the orchestra are fortunately presented in if not complete form, then at least long excerpts. Among these selections, the most outstanding is the portion of the orchestral version of Twelve Poems of Emily Dickenson which feature soprano Stella Doufexis. While the brevity of this film can be viewed as both positive and negative, its treatment of the career of Aaron Copland is an excellent introduction to his works and philosophy. Fortunately, the theatrics of the presentation do not get in the way of the essential delivery of...

A Nest of Subversive Propaganda: Progressive Children's Arts Education from the New Deal to the McCarthy Era

A Nest of Subversive Propaganda: Progressive Children's Arts Education from the New Deal to the McCarthy Era

Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman (review)

Reviewed by: Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman Ellen Schrecker Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism. By Carol Sicherman. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2011. Pp. xiv + 381. Paper $28.00. ISBN 978-0983689980. When the author of this review interviewed Harry Marks, the subject of this biography by his daughter, she was mainly interested in his experiences during the McCarthy era. He had been called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953. Questioned in an executive session, Marks described his brief sojourn in the American Communist party, named a few names, and then discoursed at length about the evils of the Soviet system. Marks anticipated that HUAC would keep his testimony secret, as it did with many of its friendly witnesses, but this was not the case. But because the committee did not publicize the release of its transcript, few of Marks’s colleagues at the University of Connecticut, where he taught European history, knew about his brush with the Cold War Red Scare. Though distressed by the prospect, Marks had felt he had no choice but to answer the committee’s questions. By 1953, the academic establishment had made it clear that college and university teachers who refused to cooperate with the witch hunt would lose their jobs. In fact, the University of Connecticut had already dismissed a number of politically tainted individuals, including a highly regarded and tenured professor of physics. Marks retained his job, serving the university as a popular and widely respected faculty member until his retirement in 1978. What Carol Sicherman’s account of her father’s life reveals is that Marks’s appearance before HUAC was not his first encounter with political repression. He had lived for a while under the Nazis. An assimilated American Jew from a solid bourgeois background, he had grown up in New York City during the 1920s in the comfortable world of German Jewish professionals and businessmen. After graduating from Fieldston, a private school catering to that milieu, he went on to Harvard, where he found his intellectual vocation as a historian. Determined to gain a deeper understanding of the culture of the country about which he was about to write his dissertation, Marks took off for Germany—just at the moment when the Weimar Republic was about to collapse. Young and somewhat naïve, Marks was nonetheless a quick learner who soon [End Page 467] grasped the significance of what he was observing. He recorded his impressions of the early months of the Third Reich in a diary, as well as in the many letters he exchanged with correspondents in both Germany and the US. This trove of sources forms the core of the book. They not only offer yet another firsthand glimpse of the way in which the Nazis shattered the affluent and cultured world of German Jewry, but also help us understand why someone like Harry Marks would then gravitate to the communist orbit. Marks was both an outsider and an insider. Once he reached Berlin, his family and academic connections brought him into a circle of upper-middle-class assimilated Jews, not all that different from the folks back home. As his command of the language improved, Marks found himself ever more comfortable in this environment, one which prized the highest forms of German culture. Most of the men and women Marks associated with were on the left politically, sympathetic to the social democracy of the SPD, though not (with a few exceptions) to the more rigorous Marxism of the German Communist Party. What seems most striking about Marks’s experience, at least as Sicherman has portrayed it, is that, for all his Berlin friends’ enthusiasm for German culture, they remained a group apart. Though they saw themselves as preserving the finest elements of their nation’s intellectual and artistic heritage, they were actually developing a separate German Jewish culture—one that the rest of their countrymen did not share. Since Marks seems to have operated within an almost entirely Jewish world, he was in a good position to observe how the Nazis set about...

Progressive lawyers under siege: Moral panic during the McCarthy era

Our goal is to analyze the culture within the San Francisco law firm of Gladstein, Andersen and Leonard (circa 1945–1965). For this we utilize archival documents, FBI files, oral histories, and personal interviews. The law firm represented alleged subversives, including Harry Bridges the longtime president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Thus, the law firm partners were stigmatized by the clients they represented and they all had lengthy FBI files. The partners all had working class backgrounds, one was an immigrant and two were Jewish. Clearly, religion and ethnicity were not litmus tests for participation in the firm, nor was educational pedigree. Gladstein and Leonard graduated from elite law schools while Andersen did his legal training at a night school. During the dark days of the Cold War various partners were threatened, shot and jailed for merely engaging in their legal practice. Ironically, as the FBI blacklisted alleged subversives, these attorneys had more clients to defend.

Dive Deeper: Journeys with “Moby-Dick.” by Cotkin, George (review)

Reviewed by: Dive Deeper: Journeys with “Moby-Dick.” by Cotkin, George David Dowling Cotkin, George. 2012. Dive Deeper: Journeys with “Moby-Dick.” New York: Oxford University Press. $18.95 sc. 302 pp. Herman Melville’s magnum opus—arguably the greatest American novel ever written and certainly the most ambitious—has had a colossal influence on Western culture since its publication in 1851. In his accessible and entertaining companion to Moby-Dick, George Cotkin charts the astonishing reach of Melville’s novel from its critical reception to its lively life in such areas as politics, religion, art, psychology, marine biology, cinema, and popular culture. Cotkin, whose academic field is twentieth-century intellectual history with an emphasis in existentialism, arranges his study according to the chapters of Moby-Dick itself. Dive Deeper thus begins with “Etymology” and “Extracts,” followed by 135 chapters (each with the focus and finish of a complete, stand-alone essay) and a concluding “Epilogue.” This arrangement both effectively traces the arc of Ishmael’s narrative and uses each chapter as a point of departure into the novel’s legacy within the broader culture, from popular representations to profiles of prominent individuals influenced by Moby-Dick. Cotkin begins each chapter by briefly touching base with a thematic keynote sounded in Melville’s original to signal the direction and subject of his own sightings of the novel in intellectual and popular culture. Chapter 84, for example, bears the heading “On the Subtleties of Harpooning Technique,” referring to the content of the novel’s corresponding chapter while also signaling the larger issues of the discussion that follows. Cotkin describes Melville’s intentions in this chapter, detailing the artful method of tossing a harpoon in a high arc, a more effective alternative to thrusting the iron like a giant dart at the whale (160). The finesse of this hunting technique raises the issue of the chapter’s self-reflexivity for Cotkin, who then takes the occasion to ruminate on Melville’s “stylistic brilliance,” linking his manic method of composition to that of Gustave Flaubert, who began composing Madame Bovary in 1851, the year Moby-Dick appeared (161). Such a connection is illustrative of Cotkin’s overall method, which is to make a connection to a Melville contemporary engaging with similar questions of authorial convention. Cotkin ends the mediation with the line, uttered by a Flaubert character, “exuberance is better than taste”; the sentiment matches Ishmael’s demand for Mount Vesuvius as an inkstand and a “condor’s quill” to expand on his grand theme. Cotkin explains how Flaubert’s line resonates with Melville’s manic process of production, which effectively places a seemingly technical description of harpooning technique into new, revealing light about the audacity and artistry of authorship (161). In other chapters, Dive Deeper functions as a clearinghouse of critical and historical data on Moby-Dick, providing provocative connections to modern and [End Page 182] contemporary culture that might serve as points of departure for further exploration. In the hands of Cotkin, Moby-Dick is of equal importance both to those interested in its influence on modern/postmodern culture and those seeking fresh insight on its place in antebellum history. For the latter, Father Mapple’s sermon is historically contextualized to offer its striking deviation from the biblical story of Jonah. In another chapter, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass appear in useful discussions of Melville’s positions on transcendentalism and race in antebellum America. The true strength of the volume, however, lies in the handling of events and controversies dating from Moby-Dick’s 1920s modernist revival to the present. Readers will delight in learning of the fraught and harrowing writing process Ray Bradbury endured to produce the screenplay of the 1956 adaptation of Moby-Dick starring Gregory Peck. Bradbury’s screenplay began, as most writing does, in a sheer panic, with a dangerously close deadline. Perhaps of most value in Cotkin’s analysis of Moby-Dick in the twentieth century is his discussion of the closeted history of gay critics Newton Arvin and F. O. Matthiessen navigating Melville’s radical gender politics during the heyday of the repressive, socially intolerant McCarthy era. The profile of critic Louis Mumford is...

State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush by Andrew Kolin

This book deserves wide readership. Conventional US history narratives celebrate growing trees of liberties. Advocates and legislators secure rights for people of color, natives, women, migrants, poor laborers, and homosexuals. Reversals, especially the McCarthy era, are portrayed as national emergencies or temporary setbacks on America's positive trajectory for values of citizenship and freedom. By contrast, this critical, painstakingly documented book shows a negative reality. Law and order prevailed over the rule of law. A public intellectual with progressive to radical outlook, Andrew Kolin, a professor of Political Science at Hilbert College, is eminently qualified. He is an accomplished author whose scholarship focused on the acute dangers inherent in oppressive state structures culminating with genocide. His comparative, theoretical, and applied public policy research and teaching analyze ethics and genocide, highlighting the Holocaust, state structure, mass media, constitutional law, and US foreign policy. Kolin ably and accessibly blended documentation with concern about official misdeeds. He offers magisterial tour de force of ideological and government-sanctioned legal and political oppression since the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The establisment subverted direct democracy through a complex system of circuitous representation and tenure on the Supreme Court.Every president used some statuary and administrative powers, alongside extrajudicial tools. Both parties are culpable in manipulating public opinion. Republican Nixon fell to Watergate, though Reagan survived Iran-Contra. Democrat Wilson victimized blacks and pacifists. Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans without cause and persecuted “subversives.” Executive organs such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency limited or disregarded democratic protections afforded to all people, particularly citizens. The infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lives on in every administration through executive privilege. Laws are coercive rather than benevolent and continually enforce wrongs rather than protect rights. This Hum Rights Rev (2013) 14:57–58 DOI 10.1007/s12142-013-0249-3

Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado

Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado

White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era

Journal Article White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era Get access Purcell Aaron D.. White Collar Radicals: TVA's Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. 288 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Stewart Jay Stewart Jay University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 52, Issue 4, October 2012, Pages 540–542, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/52.4.540 Published: 01 October 2012

Barrio, Bulldozers, and Baseball: The Destruction of Chavez Ravine

Barrio, Bulldozers, and BaseballThe Destruction of Chavez Ravine Andy McCue (bio) The cover of a Ry Cooder cd encapsulates one of the urban myths of Los Angeles. The illustration on the 2005 album shows Death driving a bulldozer through a hilly community of simple houses. Death sports a baseball cap and chomps on a cigar holder like the ones used by Los Angeles Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. For those slow on the uptake, the cover of the booklet inside the cd case shows a picture of earth-moving equipment at the groundbreaking ceremony for Dodger Stadium.1 The myth in the music, and the story repeated to this day by some former residents and activists, connects two undoubted facts.2 The poor, Mexican American community of Chavez Ravine was destroyed. And Dodger Stadium stands there today. The myth is that these facts are logically connected, that the first was done to create the second. The myth is constantly reinforced by powerful photographs and film from the archives. The pictures that appeared in Los Angeles newspapers on May 9, 1959, showed Aurora Vargas being forcibly carried down the steps of her wooden frame home by policemen. The picture is presented as a poor Mexican American family torn from their home to permit construction of Dodger Stadium. Context can be everything. In some cases, pictures need their thousand words. Some of the context came quickly in 1959, but has largely been forgotten. Mrs. Vargas was part of the extended Arechiga family. Soon after the eviction, Los Angeles newspapers reported the family owned and rented out eleven houses around Los Angeles.3 The Arechigas were not poor. They were in a dispute with the city of Los Angeles about the value of the Chavez Ravine house. The squatters who inhabited the hills around the Arechigas property were poor, but they weren’t part of the story. The rest of the context, however, was quickly lost. It’s a story of a divided city elite, a disenfranchised minority community, and the McCarthy era of the early 1950s. [End Page 47] Chavez Ravine sits in the hills just a bit north of downtown Los Angeles. Its name grew from the quickest path from the old central area of the city into the hills, up a ravine owned by Julian Chavez. In the late 1940s, it was a community of about 1,100 families, overwhelmingly Mexican American and mostly poor. Crispin Martin, who played Pancho in some of the Cisco Kid movies, lived there, but his financial status was the exception. Some of the streets were unpaved. Utilities could be haphazard. There were solid houses, but there were also ramshackle dwellings teetering on hillsides. Goats and chickens wandered freely. An elementary school and a Catholic church served as focal points.4 Chavez Ravine evoked different images. The residents saw a close community where somebody always had an eye on the kids playing outside and you could count on help if hard times hit. The elites of downtown Los Angeles saw an eyesore. They saw roaming animals, trash, wooden shacks, and poor Mexicans. The liberals in the elite wanted to improve housing conditions and conservatives in the elite wanted to clean things up. Driven by World War II, and then Cold War defense spending, Los Angeles had boomed during the 1940s. The county’s population had grown 49 percent, to nearly 1.4 million.5 But the number of available housing units had grown by only 32 percent.6 Veterans and their families were living in Quonset huts in city parks and other appropriated areas. The elites knew they had a problem and the liberals among them saw an opportunity for public housing, then a byword of urban planning across the country. In 1949, Congress passed the Public Housing Act, providing funds to build eight hundred thousand housing units across the country. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles acquired $110 million to build ten thousand units at eleven sites. In October 1950, the Los Angeles City Council signed a contract with the housing authority for the project. The 3,364 units to be built in Chavez Ravine were dubbed Elysian Park Heights...

Book Review: Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex

Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex edited by Anthony J. Nocella, Steven Best, Peter McLaren, AK Press, 2010. Pp. 590. $24.95 (Paperback). ISBN: 9781904589987[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2012 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex is a collection of essays contributed by professors and academics, many of whom have had first-hand experience as the victims of academic censorship. These experiences range from denial of tenure to being barred from entering the country.As the title suggests the academy is not an exception from being implicated in the Industrial military president Eisenhower foretold in 1961. The editor justifies this connection with the following introductory quotation. As the boundary lines between universities, corporations, and military/warfare/social policing systems were dissolving, they no longer saw three separate, unrelated entities, but rather one gigantic industrial complex. The term academic-militaryindustrial complex is short hand for the intersection, overlapping, and implosion of universities, the corporate private sector, the Department of Defense and various armed forces services, and the security and regulatory apparatuses of the State... In order to lay the groundwork for the book the editor provides definitions of state repression, political repression, and academic repression. An example of state repression is attacking labor unions. Political repression is coercion effected by protecting capitalist industries through suppression of political activity, and academic repression in the censorship of thought and speech by means of the very instruments that the academy has employed in order to guarantee free academic inquiry.The book is divided into six sections. In the first section, the editor lays out the historical context of the repression of academic freedom in the American experience. The second section offers seven case studies of academic repression, which involve professors who have been penalized for their transgressions in the form of punitive actions ranging from denial of tenure to termination. The third section provides a perspective from international academics who have experienced repression at the hands of American educational institutions. The fourth section addresses the issue of discrimination based on gender, race, and disabilities. These cases illustrate that deep-seated prejudices in academia are still very prevalent and have not yet been fully remedied by the legislative actions which were enacted to combat these prejudices. The fifth section deals with the invasion by corporations of the academic sphere and how corporate relationships are actively pursued by schools seeking to enrich themselves with corporate funding. The sixth and final section narrates the experiences of academics who have managed to thrive in spite of academic repression.This book is best used as a guideline for graduate students, budding scholars, current professors, and all others contemplating a career in academia. The narratives of the individual professors can serve as road maps which will assist academics in identifying patterns of discrimination. Each narrative is a case study that associations, legal advocates, and individuals interested in academic freedom should scrutinize when charting out their career path.An analysis by prominent McCarthy era historian Schreckner concludes that academic repression in post USA PATRIOT Act America is far more dangerous than McCarthy era repression since direct academic views, as opposed to the outside activities of the profession, have now come under scrutiny. …

Sir Moses Finley

Finley was an instructor and assistant professor in the history department at Rutgers-Newark from 1948 to 1952. He then went on to Cambridge University for a brilliant career as a classics scholar until his death in 1986. What makes his tenure at Rutgers significant is that he was dismissed by the Board of Trustees in 1952 because he refused to answer questions before the U. S. Senate Internal Security Committee on grounds of the Fifth Amendment. As a suspected communist, he was fired, deemed unfit to teach by the Board of Trustees. It was one of the most famous cases of attacks on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. This article is an edited version of an address given by McCormick (who had defended Finley before the Trustees) at Finley’s memorial service in the Kirkpatrick Chapel on November 8, 1986.

The Fear Within: Spies, Commies, and American Democracy on Trial

Scott Martelle’s The Fear Within is both engrossing and disappointing. It tells the story of the 1948–1949 prosecution of the leaders of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) for violation of the Smith Act (1940), which generated Dennis v. United States (1951), the most infamous Supreme Court decision of the McCarthy era. Although Martelle’s account of the Dennis trial is highly entertaining, this book will disappoint those seeking a complete history of the case. That Martelle is neither a historian nor a legal scholar perhaps explains why. He is a professor of journalism. As one might expect, his book is masterfully written, often reading more like a novel than a work of academic history. His descriptions of the characters in the Dennis drama bring the tumultuous trial to life. Readers can practically see and hear defendant Eugene Dennis (who acted as his own attorney) making his opening statement to the jury.

Mahšīd Amīršāhī's Afsānehā-ye Īrānī-ye ‘aṣr-e mā und James G. Thurber's Fables for Our Time

The Persian author Mahšīd Amīršāhī has dealt with Fables for Our Time by the American writer James G. Thurber (1894–1961) over several decades. In 1966, her Persian translations of the fables were published in Tehran. In 2001–2002 some of these fables were printed in the London Persian weekly Nīmrūz. The fables in Nīmrūz were not, however, faithful translations of Thurber's, but „free translations” as Amīršāhī calls her adaptations of his fables for her own ends. Amīršāhī has adapted Thurber's fables, which were published as an impression of life in the USA from between the World Wars until the McCarthy era, to make her own comments on the history of and living conditions in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This article provides a comparative study of Thurber's original fables and Amīršāhī's versions in Nīmrūz (and later) and of the narrative instruments employed by Amīršāhī for the appropriation of Thurber's materials to a contemporary Iranian setting. The article discusses their effects within the typological framework of the fable as a genre.

<i>The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University Martin J. Finkelstein The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University, by Ellen Schrecker. The New Press, 2010. 304 pp. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-59558-400-7. As the title suggests, Ellen Schrecker's The Lost Soul of American Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University, is hardly a dispassionate analysis of the status of American higher education as we complete the first decade of the twenty-first century. Professor Schrecker is a faculty member (as is this reviewer); this is not the [End Page 462] best of times to be one; and she speaks unabashedly from that perspective. The volume advances a bold and clear thesis in two parts: (a) U.S. higher education, defined most especially as the research university committed to the unfettered pursuit of truth, is threatened with irreparable damage, and (b) the source of that threat lies in a unique confluence of two developments: (1) escalating threats to academic freedom from the political right, largely in protracted response to the campus activism of the 1960s and (2) the concomitant restructuring of higher education over the past generation reflecting at once the triumph of academic capitalism and the detenuring of the faculty. Following a chapter that overviews the concept of academic freedom and explains its centrality to the work of the university, Schrecker devotes four chapters to the documentation and analysis of threats to academic freedom during the McCarthy era, the volatile 1960s, the neoconservative backlash in the 1980s and the post-9/11 period. Having completed her survey of academic freedom threats, she devotes the last two chapters to the restructuring of higher education more generally, and of the traditional academic profession, in particular. She explains the increasing market-orientation of colleges and universities in response to an array of potent developments: the massification of higher education and the attendant expansion of institutional demands including a new emphasis on undergraduate teaching; changing federal student aid policy (moving student aid funds from institutions to students and their parents, redistributing market power); the twin economic dislocations of nationwide inflation and state government disinvestment in higher education in the face of competing, and compelling, demands from K-12 education, healthcare and correction; the expansion of administration, etc. In the face of such market-abetting adjustments, the faculty has been largely marginalized, reflected most pointedly in the decline of tenure and the increasing resort to part-time and full-time, non-tenure-track faculty to staff the instructional program. Schrecker's account and analysis of academic freedom threats over the past half century, especially those post-9/11, provide a much needed follow-up to her pioneering work on the McCarthy era first reported in No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. In particular, she provides a much more comprehensive and systematic assessment of academic freedom controversies in the post-9/11 period than can be gleaned from the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education—the primary source, I fear, of information on the post-9/11 period for many of us. The major limitation of her analysis is the very expansive conception of academic freedom with which she is operating. Virtually any attack on the utterances of a faculty member is treated as ipso facto an attack on academic freedom itself—irrespective of whether it be media criticism of impolitic off-campus utterances, the sensational charges of a Bill O'Reilly against someone who happens to be faculty member, actual direct attempts at interfering with classroom teaching or scholarly publication, or violations of faculty prerogatives in academic governance. As Schrecker herself puts it: While academic governance is a less clear cut component of academic freedom than teaching or research, it is equally crucial. Without a say over the conditions of their employment, professors cannot exercise the autonomy they need in order to fulfill their professional obligations. If the educational quality and intellectual integrity of their institutions is to be maintained, faculty members must participate [End...

"Hard Travelin": Die Old Left und Folk Music im New Deal

Social movements often create new music. The old left of the United States defined itself by referring to the grass roots of American culture. Music collectors and scientists found inspiration in the songs of the working class, outsiders, cowboys and hobos. New technologies, like the gramophone and radio, and were helpful in creating collections of popular songs and in producing the first superstars of folk music. During the New Deal in the 1930s the US Democrats opened themselves more to the left and created new creative jobs and synergies for musical activists. With the rise of new popular styles, like the more apolitical country- and western-music, and the anti-communism during the McCarthy-era, folk music became unpopular before it experienced a revival in the 1960s. Its roots, however, lie in the atmosphere of the 1930s during the New Deal.

Carlos Bulosan's Final Defiant Acts: Achievements During the McCarthy Era

Although Carlos Bulosan has numerous biographies, the last decade of his life has not received much attention. We specify, for the first time, exactly why Bulosan became the subject of an FBI investigation in 1950. We also reveal that by 1955 the FBI had to admit that: Bulosan's seemingly suspicious activities were accounted for in terms of research for a book; and, there was no evidence that he was ever a member of the Communist Party-a charge that, if verified, could have gotten the famous Filipino author/ activist deported. We argue that the evidence nevertheless indicates Bulosan remained productive, militant, and defiant, until the very end.