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Witch-Hunts at Old Ivy
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12302 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1987 |
4,237 Words |
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Edward S. Shapiro
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NO IVORY TOWER
McCarthyism and the Universities
Ellen W. Schrecker
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
437 pp., $20.95
Mary McCarthy's comic 1952 novel The Groves of Academe concerns an incompetent academician who, on the verge of being fired, pretends to be a radical. He believes, and correctly so, that the only way to save his job is by transforming his case into one involving the hallowed principles of academic freedom. Ellen W. Schrecker's detailed, copiously documented, and well-written history of the McCarthyite assault on the American university during the late 1940s and early 1950s provides a different and gloomier view of what she believes to be the greatest violation of academic freedom in American history. Schrecker, the wife of the radical historian Marvin Gettleman, sees these events through a leftist lens that highlights the injustices of the era but fails to do justice to the legitimate concern of the American people, their political representatives, and most academicians regarding communism.
Six hundred teachers and professors lost their jobs during this period because of real and imagined communist connections. Schrecker's concern is with the approximately one hundred academicians who were fired because they were communists or because they refused to testify before congressional or university committees, to "name names" of people whom they knew to be members of the Communist Party, or to sign a loyalty oath. The most famous was M.I. Finley, fired by Rutgers University. Finley emigrated to England where he taught for many years at Cambridge, became one of the world's leading classicists, and was knighted.
The lives of most of the others were permanently blighted by these dark years. Schrecker believes an unofficial blacklist existed that prevented them from receiving academic appointments. Left without a steady income, some fled to Europe, Canada, and Israel. Others found work in black colleges in the South, some changed professions, and a few had to depend on their wives, relatives, and friends for financial support. Many suffered severe emotional turmoil, and a few committed suicide. "This constant absorption with how one is going to live instead of living and acting is a great waste, and takes one's mind off scientific work and humanistic political concerns that go beyond one's problems," the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, the wife of Chandler Davis, complained. "I am quite fed up."
The professors and their wives were particularly bitter toward former friends and colleagues who turned their backs on them in their hour of need. "It was not so much what these people did that upset the blacklisted professors as it was what they did not do," Schrecker writes. "They did not organize; they did not protest; they did not do anything that reversed the tide of dismissals." In addition, the professors were humiliated by the experience of testifying before governmental and academic committees that demanded they admit their guilt for things they did not regret and implicate others in a vast conspiracy they did not believe they had ever been part of or that had even existed.
The damage extended beyond that done to the victims. Most states passed laws that required teachers in public colleges and universities to
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