I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. (Stephen Spender)

Joe McCarthy died over half a century ago, but McCarthyism survived his alcohol-induced death.  Politically motivated accusations of disloyalty or subversion remain the stock-in-trade of right-wing jesters such as Fox News’ Glenn Beck and political opportunists like Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann.  But, such inquisitorial attacks also take place away from the media spotlight and, most unpleasantly, often occur on our university campuses, where tawdry political gamesmanship that could put Washington to shame has had an enduring effect: shining voices silenced, worthy books unwritten, unpublished or unread.

I have told, on these pages, about the persecution of my friend and colleague, the anthropologist, Dr. Janice Harper, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, an institution perfectly at home in a state where biology teacher John Scopes was once tried for teaching evolution.  (It amazes me that the law of gravity hasn’t been repealed there.)  Over the last two years, members of Harper’s department (some among them, ironically, specialists in “human rights”) accused her of being mentally unstable and planning to build a hydrogen bomb!  Her prospects for promotion and tenure, once a certainty, were destroyed, as the FBI and Homeland Security investigated her.  In the end, Janice was not only totally cleared, but a report by the University’s own Faculty Senate Appeals Committee, in June, 2009, concluded that “The University’s treatment of Dr. Harper may well have damaged her academic reputation beyond repair.”  The American Association of University Professors said of this Report, that “in the thoroughness and clarity of its analysis of each facet of a complex case, [it] is truly exemplary.”  Nevertheless, the University is now fiercely resisting Harper’s rightful claims for compensation.  She has been forced to sell her home and cash in her pension, while her accusers are thriving, and the AAUP and the American Anthropological Association do nothing.

Janice Harper is a dear friend, so I will not let her name be forgotten.  But, unfortunately, her case is hardly unique, either in recent times or in the past, even predating the notorious senator from Wisconsin.  If you want to begin to reconstruct the story, start with Lightner Witmer’s The Nearing Case, published just after the start of the First World War.   Scott Nearing was one of this country’s most prolific radical economists, who had written in 1913 that economics should “part company with the ominous pictures of an overpopulated, starving world, prostrate before the throne of ‘competition,’ ‘individual initiative,’ ‘private property,’ or some other pseudo-god, and tell men in simple, straightforward language how they may combine, re-shape, or overcome the laws and utilize them as a blessing instead of enduring them as a burden and a curse.”  He was teaching economics and sociology at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater), which was, surprisingly, not as conservative as it might sound (indeed, it was where Nearing himself had trained).  But, Penn’s Board of Trustees was a good cross-section of the corporate elite and they refused to renew his appointment.  There was actually considerable protest and, for a while, at least, it did not prevent him from teaching elsewhere.  But, for the most part, his chief role after leaving Penn was as a public intellectual and left-wing activist, at least until the thirties, when he and his wife, Helen, moved to rural Vermont (and, then, in 1952, to Maine).   He never stopped writing on progressive themes, but, in 1954, he and Helen co-authored Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World.  It is probably for that work and for The Maple Sugar Book, published in 1972, rather than for his economic writings, that Nearing is now remembered.  He died in 1983, at the age of 100, a decade after the University of Pennsylvania decided to reverse its 1915 dismissal of him and awarded him the title of Honorary Emeritus Professor of Economics.  As they used to say, “That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.”

Our history is strewn with the shades of writers, artists and thinkers who have been denied the right to freely exercise their craft, to practice their profession, by shrill and self-serving politics.  I was lucky. I was privileged to have progressive parents who not only refused to censor my reading, but also unflinchingly introduced me to the works of men and women who had been silenced by McCarthyism.  So, before I had graduated from high school in 1964, when very few people knew the name of the black-listed screen-writer, Ring Lardner, Jr., who would win his second Oscar in 1970 for the script of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, my parents had already given me a copy of Lardner’s remarkable novel, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir.  (Read it.  It’s as meaningful and subversive today as it ever was.) Lardner is the member of the “Hollywood Ten” who, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, said to its then Chair, J. Parnell Thomas: “I could answer the way you want, Mr. Chairman, but I’d hate myself in the morning.”

They also gave me Man Against Myth by the philosopher, Barrows Dunham.  At the time, I didn’t know much about Barrows.  But, as it happened, during my very first week at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Fall of 1964, while browsing in the college bookstore, I found a paperback copy of his book that had a few details about him on the back.  It turned out that he lived nearby, in Cynwyd, a placid suburb of Philadelphia. I hurried back to my dorm room and quickly wrote him a letter.  Within days, he had invited me to visit him.

Barrows, who was born in 1905 into a fairly progressive Philadelphia family, had gotten his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton and ended up teaching at Temple University in north Philly (where my son, Reuben, would briefly go, many years later). He had published Man Against Myth in 1947. Six years later, Giant in Chains appeared, by which time Barrows was chair of the Philosophy Department. But, then, came the persecutions. In February, he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating him on charges of subversive activities, and invoked the Fifth Amendment. As the Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in June, 1996, seven months after his death: “These charges were brought in view of his liberal writings and alleged membership in the Communist Party. Barrows believed that teachers had a right to teach without government regulation.” He was charged with contempt of Congress on February 27th, because he had failed to provide the Committee with any personal information except his name, address and date-of-birth, and the very next day, the President of Temple, Robert Johnson, wrote to Barrows: “I have the firm conviction that a teacher in an institution dedicated to truth is called upon to deal candidly and fully with responsible government authority acting to preserve the freedom of our society.” That is a lot here that could easily be contested –the precise nature of the “truth”-seeking role of universities, the relationship of that role to government authorities– but Johnson continued:

“Invoking the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution, you have declined to answer questions put to you by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives of our Congress. As President of Temple University I cannot agree that this lack of cooperation is consistent with your obligations as a teacher and your responsibilities to all members of Temple University, and to the society of which it is a part…By your refusal to answer questions put to you by the Congressional Committee on the ground that to do so might be self-incriminating, you have deliberately created a doubt as to your loyalty status. Under the circumstances I am left with no other choice but to suspend you from this University until such time as your status under the Loyalty Act of this Commonwealth has been clearly established.”

Acting with much the same respect for academic freedom that Penn had shown almost four decades earlier toward Scott Nearing, Temple’s full Board of Trustees voted unanimously to dismiss Dunham on September 23. In their statement they said that it was “obvious,” at least to them, that “truthful answers to the questions of [HUAC] could not possibly have tended in the slightest respect to incriminate him. His assertions under oath to the contrary were manifestly untrue, and it is plain that he deliberately undertook to misuse the Constitutional privilege against self-incrimination as a means of evading the duty of giving his testimony.” With such a naive sense of “duty,” they perversely disavowed the idea that the Dunham dismissal was even an academic freedom issue nor, they asserted, did it mean that a university professor had no right to “avail himself of the privilege against self-incrimination.” The problem apparently was that Barrows had "abused" it. One wonders when they would ever have considered it legitimate.

With that fascinating touch of managerial sophistry, the university dismissed him and blocked his pension and, although a Federal District Court dismissed the congressional charge of contempt in 1954, it still, shamefully, took more than quarter of a century –-until Barrows was in his mid-seventies– before Temple finally restored the pension and gave him the well-deserved title of emeritus professor. Another dime, another cup of coffee. In part, it took so long because, as Fred Zimring wrote in his 1981 dissertation, Academic Freedom and the Cold War: the Dismissal of Barrows Dunham from Temple University, A Case Study, “the [Temple] faculty refused to fight for his reinstatement and the censure action by the AAUP…posed no serious threat to the administration of Temple University.” As Barrows would write, “the AAUP censure didn’t do anything for me. I didn’t get my job back or even a monetary settlement.”

What happen to Barrows Dunham does not, of course, detract in any way from the merits of Man Against Myth. On the contrary, it makes the book’s central message far more powerful. And Temple’s behavior certainly did not dishonor Barrows. As he himself said, in a statement at the time, “No man was ever dismissed for a reason that did him greater honor…The administrators and trustees of Temple University have liberated me, but they have put themselves in chains…They administer what is, or was, an educational institution and they can never be sure when thinking may break out.” But, his effective banishment from the academy certainly meant that many people who should have read Man Against Myth (and his subsequent books) never have.

How many more books have been banished from our syllabuses or, worse, have never been written because of McCarthyism and its descendants?

TO READ THE FULL VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE: see "I Think Continually of Those Who Are Truly Great: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of McCarthyism" in The Porcupine at www.theporcupine.org