At Revolution Books on Mass. Ave., titles by Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong conspire alongside homemade-looking Communist leaflets and copies of the "Revolutionary Worker," a radical periodical.

The store may have once been a Square giant, but now it squeaks by on donations. That change also reflects a shift at Harvard, once a bastion, if not a hotbed, of Marxism.

Students and faculty say they have turned away from the Father of Communism.

"Among students and faculty, [Marxism] doesn't cut much ice anymore," says Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack Jr. '59, a self-described Marxist who has been at Harvard since 1955.

Faculty and students are careful to note that Marx has not gone into total eclipse. Undergraduates remain interested in studying and discussing revolutionary ideas. Marx is alive and well in classes like Social Studies 10, Government 10 and Sociology 10, where the reading lists are peppered with socialist thinkers.

The communist thinker simply has a different kind of following now. He's the band Abba, not En Vogue. Marxism these days has appeal "in an odd sort of retro-manner," says Jedediah S. Purdy '97, an editor of Perspective who has studied Marx. "One might use the fashion metaphor that it is equivalent to showing up at a party in your '71 easy rider biker gear. It's a cachet of anachronism."

That doesn't mean a Marxist revival is just around the corner.

"I'm glad to see [Marxism] dead and gone," says Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53. "I'll keep a careful watch to stomp on it if I see any signs of life."

History

Womack remembers when Communists had it hard on campus. During the McCarthy witchhunts of the 1950s, not even Harvard's clout could repel the anti-Communist fervor.

"The McCarthyites bashed [Harvard] terribly," recalls Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Emeritus, Samuel H. Beer, an admitted "bitter foe of Marxism."

"They'd say, 'President Conant must investigate his faculty," Beer says. "There was a prolonged harassment of the administration."

Communism became an important issue in everything, including student pranks. In his history The Harvard Century, author Richard N. Smith recalls one time during the 1950s when The Crimson pulled a joke on the Lampoon.

"When two Crimson editors stole the Lampoon's mascot, a large metal stork named Ibis, and presented it to Stalin as a gift from American students, and then the 'Poonies retalisted by reporting this flagrant example of Communist sympathizing to the McCarthy committee, it was funny," Smith writes. "The laughter died quickly however, when McCarthy attacked Harvard for its decision to retain three instructors who had supported the Communist cause in the '30s."

President James Bryant Conant '14 and later Nathan M. Pusey '28 gave McCarthy little ground. While the administration forbade the hiring of current Communists, it refused to discriminate based on past association with the Communist Party.