Last November, a Boston citizen mailed a letter addressed simply, "Kremlin on the Charles, Cambridge 38, Mass." Without a question it was delivered to the Eliot House room of the student leading the Censure McCarthy campaign.

That this could occur, and that the Post Office probably never gave it a second thought is not surprising. For years, the name "Harvard" has been equivalent in many minds to "communist", or at least to "pinko".

Applicants to the University have often questioned this reputation; their assurance of its exaggeration is echoed by those already here, and most of those who have been here in the past. For it becomes a little absurd when vague charges are balanced, for example, against the record of 174 Harvard men who are president or directors of the country's hundred largest industrial corporations, the University's eight Nobel prize winners, four senators, twenty-five congressmen, and three governors, to mention only the most prominent. It is then indeed difficult to believe in the 'red' reputation of a university which has been described as the the "last refuge of the Puritan."

The real exaggeration is the result of many things--a forty-year old myth, a troubled era, banner headlines in the Boston papers, a senator's unchecked charges, a few prominent names, a book or two, hate, and a little jealousy.

An allusion of Communist domination of Harvard arose partly because of actual happenings at the University, partly from the people who closely watch it. Boston papers have seldom been sympathetic. Their headlines in 1938 when a Communist was appointed "teaching counselor" were twice as big as those when President Pusey was elected in 1953. Last year when a rumor came from Washington that McCarthy would travel to Boston to investigate subversive activity in the metropolitan area, one Boston paper ran a seven-column banner: "McCarthy Goes to Harvard to Clean Up Reds."

But the trouble runs deeper than the Boston press, and it is not a phenomenon of recent years alone. In 1912, revolutionary leader John S. Reed '10 was able to write a statement which sounds surprisingly familiar today. "What's wrong with Harvard?" he asked. "Something is the matter. Numerous letters from alarmed alumni pour into the President's office every day, asking if Socialism and anarchy are on the rampage among undergraduates. When faculty members speak in the Midwest, someone always rises to ask if Harvard is really the hot-bed of hair-brained Radicalism that newspapers allege. Old grads shake their heads mournfully and agree the place is going to the dogs. Harvard is more restless, more turbulent, more individual in its thoughts than ever before."

The modern sentiment echoed in such a statement is not merely the result of the differences in outlook between East and West. Though the undergraduate from the Midwest has his share of stories to tell about his home town's opinion of Harvard, so also does the Eastern student. The division is far more part of a sharp cleavage between the intellectual and the "man in the street." A large segment of the population has long associated things it does not like with the name "Harvard," the representative of the intellectual. So it is somewhat natural that when "communist" became the national sea word, it too was applied to the University.

From Oregon to the Kremlin

Ironically, Harvard men themselves have often provided fodder for such charges in their testimony before congressional committees about former Communistic activities. That Harvard people--by and large--have been quite willing to talk about past associations has often been overlooked. Many critics see only that there is much information about Harvard's red history available, and conclude in their non sequltur manner that there really was an unusual concentration of communism here. So Harvard is blamed, rather than praised, for having its story told almost completely while activities on other campuses are still shrouded in speculation and rumor.

Other incidents have intensified this popular conception of the University. I Led Three Lives, for instance, Herbert Philbrick's expose of party activities in the Cambridge Youth Council and at Harvard--perhaps one of the most publicized volumes of the decade, sold millions of copies and ran in newspaper installments in practically every large city.

In the years following John Reed, chance has singled out many individuals, like him, were both associated with Harvard and sympathetic to the growing world Communist movement. For most of these men, attachment to Communism was but a passing fad, as temporary as their educational association with the University, and quite unrelated to it. For a few, Communism formed the central point of their lives, often changing them, always narrowing their future paths. An examination of the careers followed by several of these men demonstrates just how little validity there is in much of the popular impression of Harvard.

If anything definite can be said about the revolutionary's hero, himself, John Reed it is that he simply was not a product of any institution, let alone Harvard. He came to Cambridge in 1906, a product of a proper Eastern prep school and one of the wealthiest families in Oregon. During the fourteen years following, he had graduated, spent months in jail, become a famous American war correspondent, written several books, taken a leading part in the Russian revolution, been elected to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in Moscow, died of typhus in Russia, and been buried in the Kremlin's Red Square, as a hero and victim of the Russian revolution, as the Soviet Union's own Lafayette.

What had happened to the bright young boy with the proper background? The first and perhaps obvious guess--that Harvard "subverted him"--is the wrong answer.

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Reed came to Harvard already a rebel; his father, whom he idolized was a liberal crusading Western Marshall, an intimate of liberal writer Lincoln Steffens. At Harvard, young Reed's spontaneity, his free spirit, and his refusal to fit into the aristocratic mold for which his past fitted him, deprived him of much of the social prestige readily available to him. Although he became the Lampoon's ibis and gained entrance to Hasty Pudding because the club needed someone to write its show's lyrics, he could not win admission to the more exclusive clubs or to the Crimson, then dominated then by arch-aristocrats who disapproved of Reed. His most political act was to join the Cosmopolitan Club, a semi-official effort to debate the day's international issues.