Threatening Anthropology

McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

David H. Price

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780822333388
  9780822333265
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822385684
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A vital reminder of the importance of academic freedom, Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David H. Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the fbi and congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for racial justice. Demonstrating that the fbi's focus on anthropologists lessened as activist work and Marxist analysis in the field tapered off, Price argues that the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology extended far beyond the lives of those who lost their jobs. Its messages of fear and censorship had a pervasive chilling effect on anthropological investigation. As critiques that might attract government attention were abandoned, scholarship was curtailed.

Price draws on extensive archival research including correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of fbi and government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of Information Act. He describes government monitoring of activism and leftist thought on college campuses, the surveillance of specific anthropologists, and the disturbing failure of the academic community—including the American Anthropological Association—to challenge the witch hunts. Today the "war on terror" is invoked to license the government's renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as Price reveals in the appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the present.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Preface
• A Note on References
• 1 A Running Start at the Cold War:Time, Place, and Outcomes
• 2: Melville Jacobs, Albert Canwell, and the University of Washington Regents:A Message Sent
• 3 Syncopated Incompetence: The American Anthropological Association’s Reluctanceto Protect Academic Freedom
• 4 Hoover’s Informer
• 5 Lessons Learned: Jacobs’s Fallout and Swadesh’s Troubles
• 6 Public Show Trials: Gene Weltfish and a Conspiracy of Silence
• 7 Bernhard Stern: ‘‘A Sense of Atrophyamong Those Who Fear’’
• 8 Persecuting Equality: The Travails of Jack Harris and Mary Shepardson
• 9 Examining the FBI’s Means and Methods
• 10 Known Shades of Red: Marxist Anthropologists Who Escaped Public Show Trials
• 11 Red Diaper Babies, Suspect Agnates,Cognates, and Affines
• 12 Culture, Equality, Poverty, and Paranoia:The FBI, Oscar Lewis, and Margaret Mead
• 13 Crusading Liberals Advocating for Racial Justice: Philleo Nash and Ashley Montagu
• 14 The Suspicions of Internationalists
• 15 A Glimpse of Post-McCarthyism: FBI Surveillance and Consequences for Activism
• 16 Through a Fog Darkly: The Cold War’s Impact on Free Inquiry
• Appendix: On Using the Freedom of Information Act
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index