Abstract
During his long, illustrious, and probably underappreciated career at Berkeley, Bob Blauner published influential works on class (Alienation and Freedom) and race (Racial Oppression in America; Black Lives, White Lives) and also, if less influentially, on gender (Our Mothers’ Spirits, ed.). In retirement he has turned to writing history, the history of the controversy over the 1950 Loyalty Oath required of all teachers at the University of California (UC). Thirty-one of the sixty-nine American professors fired during the McCarthy Era taught at UC. (Disclaimer: one of the other thirty-eight was my godfather, much later knighted by Queen Elizabeth). Blauner interviewed survivors and their families. He thoroughly combed a variety of archival sources that included oral histories, minutes of meetings (UC Regents, UCLA and Berkeley Academic Senate) and both commercial and campus student newspapers. He has produced a useful and sometimes dramatic account of this episode and its effects. Its primary appeal will be to sociologists specializing in U.S. higher education and to historians of both the 1940s–1950s and of California, but its analytical last chapter and its epilogue on connections forward to the Free Speech Movement deserve wider attention. And while no sociologists figure as principals among faculty signers or resisters of the Oath, the text is sprinkled with references to many of our forebears in that somewhat tarnished golden age of the discipline.
The book begins by recounting the tensions between academic freedom and anti-communism from the 1920s to the 1940s when, surprisingly perhaps, UCLA’s faculty was regarded with greater suspicion than UCB’s. It shows how the university’s governing body, the Regents, though including several liberal Republicans, was dominated, if not overwhelmingly so, by conservatives with corporate (especially Bank of America) and military ties and often manipulated by the extreme right-wing regent John Francis Neylan, in an era before the term “liberal Republican” had become the oxymoron it is today. It documents the continuity between the internment of Japanese-Americans and the post-war anticommunist hysteria. The book’s central chapters then detail, sometimes confusingly, the various versions of the Oath, the arguments pro and con among the faculties at both Berkeley and UCLA, the compromises arranged by the Academic Senate and largely ignored by the Regents, and the vacillations of UC President Robert Sproul. Most fascinating in these chapters is learning the backgrounds and fates of those who resisted signing, some of them refugees from Hitler or Mussolini, others home-grown American radicals, still others adamant civil libertarians. Few faculty were women, Blauner notes, but they were slightly overrepresented among the resisters. Near the height of the controversy, the Korean War began, an event with a profound effect: as the United States was now at war with a communist state allegedly under the Kremlin’s sway, the stakes were raised for any dissent that could plausibly be tainted by accusations of disloyalty. As the global and local conflicts continued, non-signing faculty were fired, some sought employment elsewhere, some stayed to fight on, and a few participants in the struggle suffered strokes or heart attacks. UC’s reputation was tarnished, and much local and national faculty organizing was devoted to raising funds to support the fired professors, instructors, and TAs.
It is here that more names familiar to sociologists enter the picture. Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld declined appointments as visiting professors, Merton at UCLA, Lazarsfeld at Berkeley. Talcott Parsons and Louis Wirth were national leaders in raising funds for the non-signers. C. Wright Mills was among a number of prominent Columbia professors who signed a letter of protest to the Regents. We had previously learned that Reinhard Bendix did sign the Oath, but only at the last minute because he believed it “threatened democratic freedoms”; he “pointedly asked Sproul why fascists were not also excluded from the faculty” (p. 141). S. M. Lipset said in 1950 he would not return to Berkeley from a visiting appointment at Columbia if he had to sign an oath. And Philip Selznick, who moved from UCLA to Berkeley at the height of the crisis, provided Blauner with part of the basis for comparing the two campuses, an analytic theme that runs throughout the book. In fact, one of its major contributions is to rescue UCLA’s role from the relative oblivion to which previous works on the Oath controversy had consigned it.
But Berkeley is at the center of this show. In his epilogue, Blauner contests Clark Kerr’s thesis that Academic Senate support was “the critical link” (p. 236) animating the Free Speech Movement in 1964, the Oath episode having radicalized many UCB faculty and attracted left-leaning professors. In Blauner’s view, Senate support came too late to be granted so much causal credit, and was not galvanized, finally, until three months after the FSM began. But when that support came, it was overwhelming, and Oath veterans played a major role in propelling it. Not surprisingly, sociology graduate students and faculty were heavily involved. Ironically, in 1964 they had just moved into Barrows Hall, a hideous new building named for the 1919–1923 president whom Blauner calls “UC’s first anti-communist,” a man who had served with the American Expeditionary Forces in Manchuria and Siberia against the Bolsheviks, commanded the California branch of the American Legion, and, as head of the National Guard in the western United States, led the military suppression of the 1934 Bay Area general strike. One may speculate that Barrows got his edifice to offset the simultaneous naming of the psychology building for Edward Tolman, the towering figure who led the faculty resistance in 1950.