While students battled the Communist label, the administration faced similar pressure from the government and the public. From 1952-3--the years of the McCarthy hearings--the University was to secretly but systematically root out junior Faculty members with Communist Party ties, as historians and journalists later discovered.

Far from immune to McCarthyist Red-baiting, Harvard urged both avowed and suspected Communist Party affiliates to report on their colleagues. Those who failed to "name names" suffered career setbacks and were threatened with tenure denial or grant revocation.

Politically Charged

While the campus was not extremely fragmented in the late 40s, certain issues could arouse the passions of the student body.

James S. Bernstein '49 remembers that the 1948 presidential elections served to showcase the leftist impulses on campus.

During the warm-up to the Democratic primary, which featured Harry S Truman and Henry A. Wallace, Bernstein says he attended a rally held by the Harvard AYD chapter.

Truman, the incumbent an establishment Democrat, was clearly the moderates' choice. Wallace's conciliatory remarks about the Soviet Union, by then America's sworn enemy, had marked him as a radical.

"I suspected [the AYD] would be for Wallace, who was the most to the left, but apparently he wasn't to the left enough for them," Bernstein says.

Bernstein recalls how, at a cocktail party for potential new members, the AYD student leaders chanted, "If Truman's in the way, we're gonna roll right over him."

"Then they sang the same thing for Wallace," Bernstein adds.

Former Crimson editor David E. Lilienthal Jr. '49 remembers considerable debate in The Crimson's editorial meeting when the paper was deciding whether to endorse Truman or Wallace. Ultimately, The Crimson supported Truman.

Lilienthal says that the debate over academic freedom aroused student passions as well, especially after The Crimson ran a series of articles chronicling the faculty dismissals at schools around the country.

"This was a major theme in the country at the time," Lilienthal says. "If people didn't stand up and fight in this time of hysteria, Harvard would eventually find itself threatened."

Bellah, however, paints a different picture of the Harvard reaction. He says that while students were aware and concerned about what was going on outside of Harvard, few were courageous enough to openly challenge freedom of speech violations.

"You could have intense discussions at the dinner table, but that didn't result in any kind of activity that would have a real effect on events," Bellah says. "No one got agitated about it, because if you started talking about the Bill of Rights, you were branded a Communist."