Gordon Haskell Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 17 Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Three leaders in the fields of law, science and education this past week attacked the growing subversion of civil liberties in the United States.
Dr. Joel Hildebrand, dean of the University of California's College of Chemistry, predicted that if teachers at the university are forced to sign special loyalty oaths it would result eventually in a “critical situation” for the nation.
Hildebrand stated that “scholars of great distinction” at the university have said they would not sign the oath. “There are others,” he said, “on the faculty who have stated that they will resign from the university if any professor is dismissed against whom no charges of disloyalty, communism or incompetence have been brought. There are others who will seek other positions rather than remain in a university whose regents take such a cynical and dictatorial attitude toward their faculty.”
Hildebrand has been a leader of the group at the University of California who have been willing to bar proven CPers from the faculty, but who do not wish to submit to dictatorial practices by the Board of Regents.
During the same week Dr. Detlev W. Bronk, president of Johns Hopkins University, denounced the “growing trend toward secrecy in science” and reaffirmed the “universal right to know as a basic human right” in a speech in New York City.
Dr. Bronk leveled his attack at the growing restriction on scientists in all fields under the guise of protecting “secret” scientific information from disclosure to Russian spies.
At a luncheon of the Civil Rights Committee of the New York County Lawyers Association, Nathaniel Phillips, chairman of the committee, referred to Senator McCarthy’s charges against various and sundry State Department officials as evidence of the danger to men who are unable to reply to attacks made under congressional immunity. He suggested that the immunity might be withdrawn from legislators who make unfounded charges against private citizens.
These may be the first notes in a swelling chorus of opposition to the procedures of the loyalty purge as they show themselves in different fields. Of course, none of 1he above gentlemen have put their fingers on the CAUSES of the witchhunt, nor have they suggested any serious remedy short of saying “you shouldn't do that.”
In the case of Hildebrand we have an example of a man who has been willing to swallow the undemocratic and unscientific notion of guilt by association (when he says that all members of the Stalinist party should be barred from teaching) while gagging at the arbitrary exercise of power by the Board of Regents over the faculty of the university at which he teaches.
But it is not to be expected that everyone will see the whole loyalty purge in all its aspects and understand just WHY it is going on and how it is connected with the decay of our whole social order.
The important thing is to note that the loyalty purge is beginning to produce its OWN REACTION. Men in different fields, with different interests and ideas, are discovering that the loyalty purge is not something which is happening merely to some “communists” or “subversives,” but rather that something is happening to THEM. They are finding that fields of work which they held to be sacred, and of which they know from tbeir own experience that freedom is essential to progress, are being invaded and violated by the rough hand of the purge.
The same experience of a personal kind is going to hit thousands and tens of thousands of ordinary people as well as professors and university presidents. As that takes place the reaction to the loyalty purge, led by the workers who will be its most numerous and most harried victims in the long run, will rise in force. Only such a reaction can guarantee the existence of civil liberties in America. And it will come.
Gordon Haskell Archive | Trotskyist Writers’ Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 27 January 2024