Chowder & Marching Society
Hicks, however, claims that there was little study at all. "We spent most of the time discussing our activities in the other organizations, such as the Teachers Union," he says. The Communists, according to Hicks, as the most active group in the union, were able to influence most of its activities.
Party discipline within the cells relaxed during this period. "We got away with murder, as far as the Communist line is concerned," Hicks claims. "They didn't talk much about directives at that time. In the Harvard branch we all felt free, within fairly large limits, to disagree with party functionaries. . . It is therefore dangerous and unfair to assume that because an individual was once a member of the party he was its perfect and willing instrument." All who have testified agree that the group was not engaged in espionage or sabotage.
But communist activity was not limited to graduate students. It caught the undergraduate fancy too. That Harvard was unusually notable in this sort of agitation is, however, a myth. In his book, The Age of Suspicion, James Wechsler describes a mass strike at Columbia lasting several days, when the editor of Spectator was expelled for writing communist editorials. A large percentage of the student newspaper staff and many campus leaders at Columbia were, according to Wechsler's description, members of the party or close fellow travelers.
At Harvard, on the other hand, perhaps the most notable incident of communist activity was the defeat of communism by a hastily-organized chowder society. The Young Communist League and some other left-wing groups urged students to cut their eleven o'clock classes on April 13, 1934, in order "to promote the cause of peace." The demonstrators were to attend a mammoth anti-war meeting on the steps of Widener. On the same day, however, the large and prominent right-wing elements of the campus organized under the leadership of the conservative CRIMSON. They called an extraordinary meeting of the Michael Mullins Chowder and Marching Society of Upper Plympton Street to be held at the same time and place as the communist meeting. Warned of the coming battle between the two groups, the entire student body of 3,000 poured into the Yard. Three hundred men strong, the Mullins Society marched into the ranks of the opposing peace strikers, Mullins, banners urging bigger and better imperialist wars, jingoism, and increased armament. The Society's three leaders were dressed as Hitler, Karl Marx, and a boy scout. Quickly the leaders of the strike tried to beat the drum for peace, but it was too late. The strike had been turned into a farce, and the YCL leaders ran in a shower of eggs, onions, and pennies.
Student communists had first appeared on the University scene in 1932 when a group organized in Leverett House D-41 to form the John Reed Club. Chiefly intellectual and rather tame, the group was devoted to the study of scientific Marxism and education. The Young Communist League formed soon after in a much more militant fashion. Its monthly magazine, the Harvard Communist, was issued from an anonymous post office box in Boston. Besides featuring the current party line in its columns, the magazine took an active interest in winning converts from among the most susceptible, the underdog. It drew attention to the plight of the commuters who, in the days before Dudley, still had to eat lunch in a crowded room in Phillips Brooks House.
Perhaps the most significant thing to note about these years of active communism among a few students at the University is that all testimony agrees that is the thirties, when the communists were stronger here than ever before or after, faculty members did no recruiting among members of the student body. Students generally were responding to the same influences as their teachers, and were turning to communism neither because of their teachers nor their courses. Rather, the environment, assisted by the Communist Party's own, Popular Front--now aimed specifically at liberal intellectuals caused their temporary allegiance to the party. Granville Hicks writes. "The party used the intellectuals for all they were worth, but its leaders were aware, as most people today are not, that there were limits--beyond which most of them could not be used." A merely intellectual bond with the Communist party was not enough. For as soon as the intellectual ties that bound many college professors and students to communism in the thirties were broken, most of them left the party. Despite their previous conception of themselves as the main bulwark against fascism, suddenly, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-agression pact of 1939, they found themselves incongruously in step with Hitler.
Those who had joined because of the party's anti-fascist line and who had, until then, overlooked many of the other consequences of communism, bolted. Disenchanted by the pact, Hicks and Davis quickly left the party, followed, according to Hicks, by "at least half the rest of the inntellectuals."
That half the intellectuals broke away is notable. But more intriguing is the half which remained in the party. Some, of course, felt there might still be a way to reconcile the Party's apparently contradictory positions. For some, the anti-fascist position had never been the party's main appeal anyway. Others were emotionally tied to the group as their only social outlet; some just hung on. "I don't know how anyone could remain intellectually honest and remain in the party after 1939," Hicks says. "Many people, of course, had nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. But others could have done anything. Take Wendell Furry, for instance. There was no reason why he need have stayed. In fact, when I testified before the House Committee, I was sure that Furry must have left the party shortly after I did."
A Magnified 'Red Decade'
And so the "Red Decade" that has been magnified and dramatized so much amounts ultimately to a number of liberals at the University sympathizing with communism; to about 15 graduate students and teachers out of a faculty of approximately 1878 teachers from the lowest academic grades actually joining the party, and to perhaps a slightly larger number, from college, temporarily banding together. According to all reports, most of these had quit the party