I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. (Stephen Spender)

Joe McCarthy died over half a century ago, but McCarthyism survived his alcohol-induced death.  Politically motivated accusations of disloyalty or subversion remain the stock-in-trade of right-wing jesters such as Fox News’ Glenn Beck and political opportunists like Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann.  But, such inquisitorial attacks also take place away from the media spotlight and, most unpleasantly, often occur on our university campuses, where tawdry political gamesmanship that could put Washington to shame has had an enduring effect: shining voices silenced, worthy books unwritten, unpublished or unread.

I have told, on these pages, about the persecution of my friend and colleague, the anthropologist, Dr. Janice Harper, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, an institution perfectly at home in a state where biology teacher John Scopes was once tried for teaching evolution.  (It amazes me that the law of gravity hasn’t been repealed there.)  Over the last two years, members of Harper’s department (some among them, ironically, specialists in “human rights”) accused her of being mentally unstable and planning to build a hydrogen bomb!  Her prospects for promotion and tenure, once a certainty, were destroyed, as the FBI and Homeland Security investigated her.  In the end, Janice was not only totally cleared, but a report by the University’s own Faculty Senate Appeals Committee, in June, 2009, concluded that “The University’s treatment of Dr. Harper may well have damaged her academic reputation beyond repair.”  The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) said of this Report, that “in the thoroughness and clarity of its analysis of each facet of a complex case, [it] is truly exemplary.”  Nevertheless, the University is now fiercely resisting Harper’s rightful claims for compensation.  She has been forced to sell her home and cash in her pension, while her accusers are thriving. It now seems that the AAUP will try to do something, but we do not know yet whether the American Anthropological Association will.

Janice Harper is a dear friend, so I will not let her name be forgotten.  But, unfortunately, her case is hardly unique, either in recent times or in the past.  If you want to begin to reconstruct the story, start with Lightner Witmer’s The Nearing Case, published just after the start of the First World War.   Scott Nearing was one of this country’s most prolific radical economists, who had written in 1913 that economics should “part company with the ominous pictures of an overpopulated, starving world, prostrate before the throne of ‘competition,’ ‘individual initiative,’ ‘private property,’ or some other pseudo-god, and tell men in simple, straightforward language how they may combine, re-shape, or overcome the laws and utilize them as a blessing instead of enduring them as a burden and a curse.”  He was teaching economics and sociology at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania (my alma mater), which was, surprisingly, not as conservative as it might sound (indeed, it was where Nearing himself had trained).  But, Penn’s Board of Trustees was a good cross-section of the corporate elite and they refused to renew his appointment.  There was actually considerable protest and, for a while, at least, it did not prevent him from teaching elsewhere.  But, for the most part, his chief role after leaving Penn was as a public intellectual and left-wing activist, at least until the thirties, when he and his wife, Helen, moved to rural Vermont (and, then, in 1952, to Maine).   He never stopped writing on progressive themes, but, in 1954, he and Helen co-authored Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World.  It is probably for that work and for The Maple Sugar Book, published in 1972, rather than for his economic writings, that Nearing is now remembered.  He died in 1983, at the age of 100, a decade after the University of Pennsylvania decided to reverse its 1915 dismissal of him and awarded him the title of Honorary Emeritus Professor of Economics.  As they used to say, “That and a dime will get you a cup of coffee.”

Our history is strewn with the shades of writers, artists and thinkers who have been denied the right to freely exercise their craft, to practice their profession, by shrill and self-serving politics.  I was lucky. I was privileged to have progressive parents who not only refused to censor my reading, but also unflinchingly introduced me to the works of men and women who had been silenced by McCarthyism.  So, before I had graduated from high school in 1964, when very few people knew the name of the black-listed screen-writer, Ring Lardner, Jr., who would win his second Oscar in 1970 for the script of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, my parents had already given me a copy of Lardner’s remarkable novel, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir.  (Read it.  It’s as meaningful and subversive today as it ever was.) Lardner is the member of the “Hollywood Ten” who, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, said to its then Chair, J. Parnell Thomas: “I could answer the way you want, Mr. Chairman, but I’d hate myself in the morning.”

They also gave me Man Against Myth by the philosopher, Barrows Dunham.  At the time, I didn’t know much about Barrows.  But, as it happened, during my very first week at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Fall of 1964, while browsing in the college bookstore, I found a paperback copy of his book that had a few details about him on the back.  It turned out that he lived nearby, in Cynwyd, a placid suburb of Philadelphia. I hurried back to my dorm room and quickly wrote him a letter.  Within days, he had invited me to visit him.

Barrows, who was born in 1905 into a fairly progressive Philadelphia family, had gotten his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton and ended up teaching at Temple University in north Philly (where my son, Reuben, would briefly go, many years later). He had published Man Against Myth in 1947. Six years later, Giant in Chains appeared, by which time Barrows was chair of the Philosophy Department. But, then, came the persecutions. In February, he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating him on charges of subversive activities, and invoked the Fifth Amendment. As the Princeton Alumni Weekly wrote in June, 1996, seven months after his death: “These charges were brought in view of his liberal writings and alleged membership in the Communist Party. Barrows believed that teachers had a right to teach without government regulation.” He was charged with contempt of Congress on February 27th, because he had failed to provide the Committee with any personal information except his name, address and date-of-birth, and the very next day, the President of Temple, Robert Johnson, wrote to Barrows: “I have the firm conviction that a teacher in an institution dedicated to truth is called upon to deal candidly and fully with responsible government authority acting to preserve the freedom of our society.” That is a lot here that could easily be contested –the precise nature of the “truth”-seeking role of universities, the relationship of that role to government authorities– but Johnson continued:

“Invoking the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution, you have declined to answer questions put to you by the Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives of our Congress. As President of Temple University I cannot agree that this lack of cooperation is consistent with your obligations as a teacher and your responsibilities to all members of Temple University, and to the society of which it is a part…By your refusal to answer questions put to you by the Congressional Committee on the ground that to do so might be self-incriminating, you have deliberately created a doubt as to your loyalty status. Under the circumstances I am left with no other choice but to suspend you from this University until such time as your status under the Loyalty Act of this Commonwealth has been clearly established.”

Acting with much the same respect for academic freedom that Penn had shown almost four decades earlier toward Scott Nearing, Temple’s full Board of Trustees voted unanimously to dismiss Dunham on September 23. In their statement they said that it was “obvious,” at least to them, that “truthful answers to the questions of [HUAC] could not possibly have tended in the slightest respect to incriminate him. His assertions under oath to the contrary were manifestly untrue, and it is plain that he deliberately undertook to misuse the Constitutional privilege against self-incrimination as a means of evading the duty of giving his testimony.” With such a naive sense of “duty,” they perversely disavowed the idea that the Dunham dismissal was even an academic freedom issue nor, they asserted, did it mean that a university professor had no right to “avail himself of the privilege against self-incrimination.” The problem was that Barrows had abused it. One wonders when they would ever have considered it legitimate.

With that touch of managerial sophistry, the university dismissed him and blocked his pension and, although a Federal District Court dismissed the congressional charge of contempt in 1954, it still, shamefully, took more than quarter of a century –-until Barrows was in his mid-seventies– before Temple finally restored the pension and gave him the well-deserved title of emeritus professor. Another dime, another cup of coffee. In part, it took so long because, as Fred Zimring wrote in his 1981 dissertation, Academic Freedom and the Cold War: the Dismissal of Barrows Dunham from Temple University, A Case Study, “the [Temple] faculty refused to fight for his reinstatement and the censure action by the AAUP…posed no serious threat to the administration of Temple University.” As Barrows would write, “the AAUP censure didn’t do anything for me. I didn’t get my job back or even a monetary settlement.”

What happen to Barrows Dunham does not, of course, detract in any way from the merits of Man Against Myth. On the contrary, it makes the book’s central message far more powerful. And Temple’s behavior certainly did not dishonor Barrows. As he himself said, in a statement at the time, “No man was ever dismissed for a reason that did him greater honor…The administrators and trustees of Temple University have liberated me, but they have put themselves in chains…They administer what is, or was, an educational institution and they can never be sure when thinking may break out.” But, his effective banishment from the academy certainly meant that many people who should have read Man Against Myth (and his subsequent books) never have.

Barrows Dunham is hardly the sole example of a silenced voice, from whom there was much to be learned. So, we should know by now that critical, creative thinkers cannot be looking constantly over their shoulders, although that is precisely what the State would like. But, we also need to understand that it is not just the inquisitors, the legislators, the managers, who circumscribe our freedom of thought. Surveillance, overt or implicit, inevitably affects the way that most academicians, whether they are economists anthropologists or philosophers, go about their business. In a new Indian edition of Man Against Myth, Randhir Singh, retired Professor of Political Theory at the University of Delhi, reminds us that Barrows had once observed that, “Whereas philosophers had once speculated boldly about the universe as a whole, they now preferred the safer latitudes of language. They began as seers, and they dwindled into grammarians.” Why? There were many reasons for this shift, but not least was the fact that, “Of all subjects, linguistics is the one over which the police are least watchful.” Wittgenstein would not worry a Board of Trustees the way Barrows Dunham did.

Economists had an even rougher time.  During the Cold War, the progressives among them confronted the powers-that-be and the witch-hunters, with the result that, by deliberate culling or by self-censorship, there was little unorthodox economics left in the United States by 1970.  As Frederic S. Lee wrote in the Journal of Economic Issues in 2004, “By 1970 there were over 15,000 American economists, most of whom were neoclassical economists and belonged to the American Economic Association (AEA). Because of the repressive dominance of neoclassical economists and because of the pre- and post-war repression of heterodox economics and economists, neoclassical economists shared membership in a tightly knit community…[that] accepted a single, relatively homogeneous body of ideas or theories.”  Thus, through the seventies, radical economists suffered real hardships in securing employment or tenure.  As Lee continues:

“The most publicized event with regard to reappointment and tenure occurred at Harvard when in 1972 its economics department denied tenure to Sam Bowles…with the result that, by 1974, four of its five radical economists had left. The radical economist who remained was Stephen Marglin, who obtained tenure before getting interested in and identified with radical economics…Similar events occurred at Yale University, where in 1969-70 Stephen Hymer was allegedly refused tenure and promotion after he made a public commitment to Marxism; at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where in 1972 Michael Best was allegedly denied reappointment because he was not an economist with promise since he intended to publish in the Review of Radical Political Economics; at San Diego State College, where in 1973 Peter Bohmer was allegedly fired for being a radical economist; at Idaho State University, where in 1973 Ron Stanfield was allegedly not re-appointed solely because of his radical views; at San Jose State University, where in May 1974 three heterodox economists–David Landes, Gayle Southworth, and Andy Parnes–were replaced by four conservative neoclassical economists and Douglas Dowd was continually threatened with dismissal by its president; at St. Mary’s College, where in 1974 Eugene Coyle was allegedly denied tenure for not teaching traditional microeconomics in the usual uncritical manner; at University of Massachusetts-Boston, where in 1975 Paddy Quick’s contract was allegedly not renewed because of her political activities; and at Stanford in 1975, when Foley was allegedly denied tenure because of his growing interest and research in Marxian economics.”

Strangely enough, the economics field was actually becoming more open during this period.  But, there was also a graveyard of good people and a mausoleum of important ideas –-and the legacy of that loss is inestimable.  Our present economic crisis, of course, is largely attributable to inherent defects in capitalist economy.  But, the hardships being faced by millions of people today might have been prevented or, at least, lessened, if some of today’s leading economic practitioners, like Larry Sommers and Timothy Geithner, had read less Paul Samuelson, with his inordinate contempt for Marx, and more of the followers of Marx.

I was fortunate, during the years that I lived in The Netherlands (1992-2007), when I taught at the Institute of Social Studies, one of the world’s leading centers of development studies, to have the opportunity to read the work of heterodox economists whose writing is rarely cited in U.S. scholarship.  That, of course, did not mean that the Institute had itself escaped the prejudices that prevailed elsewhere in the Western world.  Far from it.  For several years in the mid-seventies, it had been the academic home of Ernest Feder, one of the greatest critical thinkers on agrarian issues in the decades after the Second World War.  Yet, in 1976, the Institute of Social Studies, supposedly on the cutting-edge of development theory, refused to offer the author of the now classic works, Strawberry Imperialism and The Rape of the Peasantry, more than a one-year, non-renewable contract, on the implausible grounds that it would find someone who was “suitable” for a longer appointment (an additional year, according to the position’s original description).  By the time I arrived at the Institute in 1992, there was scarcely anyone there who remembered that Ernest Feder had even taught there.  I know how that happens.  I spent 16 years there, fighting for promotion and tenure, harassed by a narrow-minded management.  And I imagine that, now that I am gone, I am equally forgotten.

Nevertheless, it was there that I encountered the work of Daniel Thorner (and his wife, colleague and collaborator, Alice).  Hence, when I wrote my book, The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development, in particular my chapter on the “False Premises, False Promises” of the Green Revolution, I was able to cite their Land and Labour in India (1962), and Daniel’s The Shaping of Modern India, edited and published by Alice after his death.  But, Daniel Thorner’s work is rarely referred to among people in the States who write about peasants, the subject to which he had contributed so much enlightened and critical thinking in the years before his premature death, in France, in 1974 (Alice died in 2005).  Thus, the great Indian historian, former Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, Irfan Habib, has written that Daniel was one of a small group of people who “brought the peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time.”  So, why is Daniel Thorner rarely known in his own country?  It is largely because his country and his university forced him into exile, after he refused to capitulate to the McCarthy Committee in 1952.

Daniel Thorner was born in New York City in May, 1915.  He attended City College (graduating, Phi Beta Kappa) and then went on to doctoral studies at Columbia University.  As a result, he and Alice arrived in London just before the outbreak of World War Two, for Daniel to undertake the research that culminated in his ground-breaking thesis, published in 1951 by the University of Pennsylvania Press as Investment in Empire.  Most importantly, the Thorners also became closely acquainted during this period with such members of the Indian nationalist community in Britain as P. N. Haksar, later Personal Private Secretary of Indira Gandhi, Feroze Gandhi, a journalist who later married Indira Ghandi, and V. K. Krishna Menon, lawyer, co-founder of Penguin Books and later Minister of Defence in Nehru’s Cabinet.

Returning to the States in mid-1940, Daniel soon got a job in Washington, D.C., as a junior analyst in Colonel William Donovan’s Office of the Coordinator of Information, shortly before it became the Office of Strategic Services (later, the CIA).  Then, in 1944, he joined Owen Lattimore’s Institute of Pacific Relations and assisted on Lattimore’s important book, Pivot of Asia.  In 1947, he obtained a position at the University of Pennsylvania and, by 1948, he was appointed research assistant professor of economic history in the Wharton School, Scott Nearing’s old academic home.   The Thorners settled into a house in Bala Cynwyd, not far from Barrows Dunham (though I have no idea if they ever met).

The following year, the protracted Chinese civil war finally ended with a Communist victory, which became the trigger for Joe McCarthy’s rapid ascendancy, beginning with his speech in February, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he charged that there were communists in the State Department, the reason that the U.S. had “lost” China.  A month later, McCarthy accused Lattimore of being the chief Soviet spy in the United States.

In July, 1951, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee  (also known as the McCarran Committee, after its Chair, Pat McCarran of Nevada) began what turned out to be a 17 month-long investigation of the Institute of Pacific Relations that included 12 days of testimony by Lattimore.  At its conclusion, he was indicted on six counts of perjury, all of which were eventually dismissed three years later by a federal Court.  Nonetheless, Lattimore’s academic life in the States was effectively destroyed and he eventually left for England, where he taught Chinese history at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire.  In stark contrast, one of his chief academic accusers (who apparently had also accused Thorner of being a communist), the German-born sinologist, Karl Wittfogel, had a flourishing career at Columbia University.

In March, 1952, Daniel Thorner, then a junior academic at Penn, himself testified before the McCarran Committee.   In the course of his testimony, he was asked on several occasions if he was ever a member of the Communist Party, and always declined to answer.  But, as Daniel explained in a meeting held in the office of Penn’s acting president William DuBarry on March 26, the day after his hearing, “he had stated under oath (in executive session) that he was not (a member of the) Communist (Party), but he did not remember whether (he had repeated) this in open session.  He further stated that he had invoked his constitutional privileges in order to save himself from a series of questions concerning other people, and perhaps a questioning by the House Committee.”

At a subsequent meeting two days later, Penn’s president expressed his concerns about Daniel’s testimony.  “Teachers, men of integrity and honor,” he said, rather loftily, “did not fear to answer questions because they would incriminate themselves, because their lives were such that they had performed no acts which would incriminate them…” Either DuBarry had a rather disingenuous view of the way the world worked and, in particular, of the way the congressional committees were affecting peoples’ lives, or something else was up.   In any event, the next evening he met again with Thorner, at Daniel’s request.  At that time, apparently, Daniel said that he had briefly attended the meetings of the Graduate Student Communist Club of Columbia University in early 1939, shortly before getting married and moving with Alice to her parents in New Jersey, a month before they set sail for England.  According to DuBarry’s memorandum, Daniel said he no longer believed in Communism, but, in Washington, D.C., “had fallen back on his Constitutional Rights concerning self-incrimination as he did not want to be an ‘informer.’”  DuBarry, sounding much like Temple’s president addressing Barrows Dunham, then noted: “I urged [Thorner] to go back to Congress and tell the truth.”

In the meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania was coming under increasing pressure from several directions.  In April, DuBarry was sent a memo saying that the State Department had received “information from confidential sources…that Dr. Thorner IS [sic] a Communist.”  This information was apparently also forwarded by State to Bombay (now Mumbai), where Daniel was then on sabbatical with his family, instructing the Consulate “to pick up his passport if he would not sign an affidavit.  Dr. Thorner,” the memo continued, “when confronted with this demand, refused (as he did here) to give details.  His passport was picked up.”

The Thorners were now effectively stuck in India, unless they chose to return to the States.  But, what fate awaited them there?  Penn had cannily decided to grant Daniel a leave of absence with full salary if he continued his stay in India but, as DuBarry wrote to John Gardner, Vice President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which funded the university’s South Asia program in which Daniel taught, “he has not been given another appointment as assistant professor at the University.”

Penn had given in to pressure from Carnegie.  The previous May, Gardner had written to DuBarry: “We now feel an obligation to express the judgment that the testimony which Mr. Thorner gave before the Internal Security Sub-committee…may fairly raise in the minds of unprejudiced persons serious questions as to the objectivity and impartiality of any studies with which he may be associated.”  This, of course, assumed that Gardner, DuBarry and McCarran were “unprejudiced persons.”  But, from that principle, Gardner went on: “it has never been the policy of the Corporation to assert the right or to assume the responsibility of approving or vetoing appointments made by universities in connection with any of the programs aided by our grants.”  Nevertheless, they felt compelled to make an exception with Daniel Thorner.

Carnegie was being careful.  In 1947, it had made a grant of $12,000 to the Page School at Johns Hopkins for a seminar on Inner Asia that had provided the context for a group study project on China’s Sinkiang Province.  Out of this had come Lattimore’s book, Pivot of Asia.  Now, Daniel Thorner, who had worked on that project, was a junior faculty member in Penn’s South Asia program, which was also funded by Carnegie.  No wonder Gardner wrote to DuBarry in October, 1953, thanking him for the up-date and commenting: “I think that you have handled everything very sensibly.”  A year earlier, the Cox Committee had looked into “subversive and Communist penetration” of philanthropic foundations and now, a month after Gardner’s letter, the Reece Committee (the House Special Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations) began hearings to see whether such foundations, but especially Rockefeller and Carnegie, in the words of the Committee’s Director of Research, Norman Dodd, were using their immense resources “to finance ideas and practices incompatible with the fundamental concepts of our Constitution.”

Daniel Thorner was sacrificed for the sake of Carnegie’s reputation.  Unlike Lattimore, the Committee never charged Daniel Thorner with anything.  But, as Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, a former Professor of Indian Economic History at Jawaharlal Nehru University and close colleague of Thorner, has written: “on the threshold of a brilliant career with a widely appreciated book already to his credit, he became overnight a person unsuitable for appointment in an American university.”  The Thorners would never return to live in the States.  They remained in India, doing important work.  As Bhattacharya notes, “Once the year’s salary from the University of Pennsylvania was used up, the Thorners had no regular sources of income.  At first they sold off their Philadelphia home and ate the proceeds.  Short-term assignments from a U.S. labour research project and from UNESCO provided some help.  The principal resource, however, was the generosity of the two sets of parents.”  Finally, in 1960, Daniel took up a professorial appointment at the illustrious Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where he and Alice remained until his premature death in 1974.

A year later, the U.S. economist and India specialist, George Rosen, who had worked at the Ford Foundation (whose assessment of Indian population and development trends Daniel had seriously questioned), wrote an obituary of Daniel for the Journal of Asian Studies. He said simply: “[Thorner] returned to India in 1952 to carry on research on India’s changing agrarian structure. As a result of the excesses of the McCarthy period in the United States, he decided to stay there….” (1975:777) Of course, it was far more than that and, although we owe to that “decision” the important body of work that Daniel and Alice Thorner produced on Indian rural economy, it should never be forgotten that it was one forced on them by academic injustice and political expediency.

I feel a special responsibility toward the people I have written about here and I think about them continually.  Barrows Dunham was a dear, inspiring friend who gave me what is now a well-worn copy of his book, Heroes and Heretics, when I graduated from Penn in 1968.  I feel a special affinity for Daniel Thorner, because our paths –separated by so many years– seem to have constantly crossed, intellectually and politically. And I write of Janice Harper, because she is a true friend and because I have been a witness.

In the end, we are all witnesses. The question is whether we remain silent.