Priests of Our Democracy

The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge

Marjorie Heins

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814770269
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica del derecho

Priests of OurDemocracy tells of the teachers and professors whobattled the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s. It traces the political fortunesof academic freedom beginning in the late 19th century, both oncampus and in the courts. Combining political and legal history with wrenchingpersonal stories, the book details how the anti-communist excesses of the 1950sinspired the Supreme Court to recognize the vital role of teachers andprofessors in American democracy. The crushing of dissent in the 1950simpoverished political discourse in ways that are still being felt, and FirstAmendment academic freedom, a product of that period, is in peril today. Incompelling terms, this book shows why the issue should matter to everyone.

PART I
Prelude to the Deluge

1
“Sifting and Winnowing”

Professors under Siege

Academic freedom was not a coherent concept in America before the late 19th century. But as the nation’s universities evolved from sectarian institutions drilling young gentlemen in Latin and Greek into something approaching the modern ideal of scholars united in a quest for knowledge, conflicts over the role of professors, the powers of trustees, and the very nature of the academic enterprise began.

The notion of college teaching as a profession and of the university as a venue for scholarly research and critical inquiry was just developing. Guild-like academic associations began to replace the less exclusive “learned societies” that dominated intellectual life before the Civil War.¹ Literature professors formed the Modern Language Association in 1883; historians formed the American Historical Association in 1884. The American Economics Association followed in 1885, the American Political Science Association in 1903, and the American Sociology Association in 1905.² Along with the new societies came a new élitism: as one historian put it, academics began to speak mainly “to each other rather than the general public.”³ But at the same time, new fields like economics and sociology incorporated social activism: these scholars wanted their work to make a difference in the real world.⁴ Professors gained social status because of their reform activity and government’s increasing use of experts; as another author notes, “the new type of professor, the practical man, was winning public approval,” while “the humanistic scholar more often felt elbowed aside.”⁵

The last few decades of the 19th century saw fierce battles between robber-baron capitalists and their exploited workers. There was revolutionary rhetoric and sometimes violence on the workers’ side, and greater violence by the owners in response. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 paralyzed transport, was brutally suppressed, and seemed a harbinger of full-dress class war. Charismatic labor leaders like Eugene Debs, soon to found the Socialist Party, caused panic among the middle and upper classes.⁶ As the turmoil continued into the 1890s, with nearly 500 strikes per year,⁷ some professors, particularly in economics and other branches of the new social sciences, spoke out on the side of labor and reform. University boards of trustees, populated largely by corporate executives, were not happy with the activist scholars.

Economics professor Edward Bemis was a prime example of the new academic. He wrote popular articles on local government, tax policy, working conditions, labor strikes, socialism, and religion.⁸ He began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1892 after stints at Amherst and Vanderbilt but was ousted three years later because of his politics. Bemis sympathized with labor during the 1894 railroad strike against the Pullman Company of Chicago. In a speech, he seemingly excused unlawful acts by the strikers, or at least suggested that the companies “must set an example” if they expect their workers “to be law-abiding.”⁹ The speech “was considered nothing short of treasonous” by Chicago businessmen, and the university president obliged them by warning Bemis to “exercise very great care in public utterance about questions that are agitating the minds of the people.”¹⁰ Bemis was fired the following year and went on to serve as superintendent of the Cleveland, Ohio, Water Works where, over protests from the local Democratic machine, he replaced party hacks with a merit system of employment, reduced water rates, and crusaded for higher tax valuations on corporate property.¹¹ Given these accomplishments, one might think that his loss to academia was a gain for society, but it is telling that at the time, at least some universities were less hospitable to ideas about social reform than were major public employers like the City of Cleveland.

Professor Richard Ely had been Bemis’s mentor and was even better known for social-reform views. An economist whose philosophy mixed Christian piety, redistribution of wealth, and the rights of labor, Ely promoted his ideas through an accessible writing style rather than the obfuscatory prose that was coming to dominate academia.¹² His “trial” at the University of Wisconsin in 1894 became the defining moment for academic freedom in its early years.

Wisconsin was a crucible of social-reform ideas when Ely arrived there in 1892. There were municipal reform movements across the state, with a core of dedicated professors contributing to the “Wisconsin idea” of an activist government staffed with a merit-based civil service and relying on many expert commissions.¹³ But two years later, unemployment and labor war, most notably the long, bitter Pullman strike, left the country in turmoil. The Nation magazine condemned the strike, and socialism in general; it then criticized “the common practice among Christian and other socialists and utopians of abusing nearly everybody who succeeds in life as an enemy of the human race, and the existing constitution of society as an engine of fraud and oppression.” Instead, the Nation editors cautioned, it was “the solemn duty of all writers, preachers, and professors, who are engaged in the work of reform, to refrain from denunciations of the existing society and social arrangements.”¹⁴ Wisconsin superintendent of public instruction and ex officio university regent Oliver Wells wrote in support of this laissez-faire viewpoint, in a letter that the magazine published under the headline “The College Anarchist.” The Nation continued its attack the following week, reporting sardonically that “a few years ago Prof. Ely sent forth his platitudes on socialism, ethics, and labor from Johns Hopkins University, but that institution was able to spare him when he desired to extend his usefulness over the wider field of the boundless West.”¹⁵

Wells’s letter accused Ely not only of writing “glittering generalities and mystical and metaphysical statements” but of pressuring a local printer to use exclusively union labor and threatening to take his business elsewhere if the printer did not comply. Newspapers reprinted the letter; the university regents appointed a committee of three prominent citizens to investigate the charges.¹⁶ Ely proclaimed his innocence, and the printer backed him up, testifying that although the professor had repeatedly urged him to unionize, he had not made any threats.¹⁷ Ely did not cite free speech in his defense; in fact, he said that if the charges were true, they would have shown him “unworthy of the honor of being a professor in a great university.” But his supporters saw an opportunity to argue for a professor’s right to off-campus political activity, and on the last day of the hearings, university president Benjamin Andrews told the Board of Regents that if they fired Ely it would be “a great blow at freedom of university teaching in general and at the development of political economy in particular.”¹⁸

The board agreed. Its September 1894 report not only exonerated Ely but sang the praises of academic freedom as a necessary component of “a university with over one hundred instructors supported by nearly two millions of people who hold a vast diversity of views regarding the great questions which at present agitate the human mind.” As regents, they said, “we could not for a moment think of recommending the dismissal or even the criticism of a teacher even if some of his opinions should, in some quarters, be regarded as visionary.”¹⁹

The report’s rhetorical climax was a sentence that, 16 years later, was reproduced on a plaque that sits at the entrance to the university’s main administration building. “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere,” the regents proclaimed, “we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”²⁰ The regents thus “turned a trial in which academic freedom had scarcely been mentioned into an occasion for a bold assertion of the right of free inquiry and expression.”²¹ Ely was at best a reluctant hero of the proceedings: he accepted the assumption that the regents had the power to censor his views and off-campus activity, and he soon began to retreat politically.

Professor Ross and Mrs. Stanford

Other Ely acolytes had academic-freedom crises. John Commons, one of his star students when Ely was a professor at John Hopkins, went on to lose jobs at Indiana and Syracuse Universities in the 1890s because of his reformist views. Through Ely’s efforts, Commons joined the Wisconsin faculty in 1904.²² Edward Ross, another protégé from Hopkins, was hired by Stanford but offended the widow of the university’s founder, who now constituted a one-person board of trustees. Ross defended socialism, supported public ownership of utilities, and railed against big companies’ use of immigrant Asian labor in terms redolent with the racist stereotypes that were common even among progressives at the time. “Perhaps Leland Stanford, had he been alive, would have tolerated the iconoclasm of the professor,” write Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, authors of the major history of academic freedom in its early years, “but his wife had all the prejudices of her class, and they had been hardened by her ignorance into absolutes.” She wrote to the university president, David Starr Jordan, that Ross had scandalously stepped “out of his sphere, to associate himself with political demagogues,” “exciting their evil passions” and “play[ing] into the hands of the lowest and vilest elements of socialism”: “I must confess I am weary of Professor Ross, and I think he ought not to be retained at Stanford University.”²³

Jordan protested that Ross was “one of the best teachers” and neither “an agitator nor a socialist,” but Jane Stanford was adamant and, in 1900, forced Ross to resign. Ross issued a public statement; the press picked up the story, and the activist professor soon became a national symbol of academic resistance to what one student of the case aptly called “the arrogance of economic power.”²⁴ Even the Nation, which had set off the campaign against Richard Ely six years before, was quiet, and its owner at the time, the New York Evening Post, which in 1894 had campaigned to stamp out socialism in the universities, supported Ross.²⁵

Stanford now faced a crisis. An esteemed senior professor, George Howard, called Ross’s firing “a blow” to academic freedom and therefore “a deep humiliation to Stanford University.”²⁶ When Mrs. Stanford forced Jordan to fire Howard as well, seven more professors resigned in protest, among them philosopher Arthur Lovejoy. Lovejoy went on to help found the AAUP, largely as a response to the continuing interference by trustees with the free speech of scholars. Although an alumni committee attempted to calm the waters by reporting that Ross was dismissed for unprofessional behavior, an outside report by a committee of leading economists came to the opposite conclusion.²⁷

With Ely’s help, Ross was eventually hired by the University of Wisconsin, where he remained controversial. In 1910, the feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman spoke at the campus Socialist Club and the local YMCA. Ross was accused of anarchism by local newspapers and, as he put it, by “certain financiers and capitalists on the Board of Regents” after he announced Goldman’s lecture to his classes and escorted her around the campus.²⁸ This time, he kept his job and, unlike Ely, did not move politically rightward with the passage of time: his research and writings provided a basis for later laws on factory safety, child labor, maximum working hours, and minimum wages.²⁹

Scott Nearing and the AAUP

Scott Nearing, since 1906 an economics professor of at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, was among the best known of the Progressive era’s muckraking intellectuals. The left-wing critique of society propounded by such scholar-activists as Nearing had by 1915 gained some traction among both working- and middle-class Americans. The socialist periodical Appeal to Reason commanded a national circulation of more than 700,000; Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs received nearly a million votes for president in 1912—6% of the total; socialists won state and local offices; Wisconsin and New York elected socialists to Congress.³⁰ In New York City, socialism was a means of “transition and acculturation” for immigrants, writes the critic Irving Howe, especially for Jewish workers. At union meetings, they learned how to make speeches, to conduct meetings, and to follow Robert’s Rules of Order.³¹

Nearing was an immensely popular teacher: his introductory economics course, with more than 400 students, was the largest class in the university.³² He had just left Philadelphia for summer vacation in June 1915 when his secretary called to tell him of a letter from the provost advising that his contract would not be renewed. No reason was given, but the decision was not a surprise: Nearing had recently been active in drives for decent wages and an end to child labor, and a group of business-oriented alumni had been pressuring the university’s Board of Trustees for the past several years to fire him on the ground that his “unsound” and “radical” views “tended to arouse class prejudice” and to lead to “fallacious conclusions.”³³

The young Professor Scott Nearing. (University of Pennsylvania archives)

Nearing, like Edward Ross before him, was an excellent publicist: he quickly sent a mailing to about 1,500 newspapers and prominent individuals. The summary dismissal of a well-known activist intellectual, and the outraged reaction among faculty and students at Penn and around the country, inspired a media blitz that lasted several months.³⁴ The World, the Pulitzer paper in New York, wrote satirically that the trustees would do well “to state with absolute clearness the rules to be obeyed” in the future; “it is not yet too late to bar all intruders who may incline to offenses against the only true Pennsylvania faith.”³⁵ The New York Times bucked the trend with a ...