2

“Let the rascal speak”

McCarthyism and Student Political Activity in the Fifties

When Jeffry Kaplow arrived at the University of Wisconsin in September 1952, he was a freshman from Brooklyn, one of several hundred students from New York at the university that year. Like many of those students, he also had an interest in politics; his mother, a seamstress and Communist Party sympathizer, was just one of many relatives involved in one way or another with the Old Left, the constellation of socialist, communist, and other radical groups that had been politically influential earlier in the century but had declined rapidly with the onset of the Cold War. Kaplow himself had been a member of the Brooklyn chapter of the Labor Youth League (LYL), which had been formed in 1949 as the youth group of the Communist Party; when he arrived at Wisconsin, he found a chapter of the same organization, by then the only LYL chapter in the country that was recognized by a university as a legitimate student group. Despite the risks that went along with membership in an avowedly Marxist organization in the 1950s, during the height of the anticommunist fervor named after Wisconsin’s own junior senator, Joe McCarthy, he quickly joined.

Kaplow and his fellows in the league enjoyed the benefits of Wisconsin’s relative commitment to civil liberties, at least in the context of the McCarthy era, but the operations of an organization like the Labor Youth League, officially labeled “subversive” by the federal government, were still severely limited. “There was a great deal of talk and a certain amount of show in our Madison days,” Kaplow remembers, but “if Madison in the 1950s was quasiunique in being the only university community not to brand us young Reds as pariahs, we were nonetheless constrained to work quietly.” Often on the defensive, members spent a good deal of their time trying to prove to the rest of the campus “that we were not conspirators bent on destroying all that was holy in the American republic.” In practice, this often meant that members applied much of their energy and ideas working within more mainstream campus organizations. Though condemned by some as an effort to infiltrate and take over these groups, Kaplow suggests that this practice was a way for members to work on issues that they genuinely believed in, like civil rights, peace, or academic freedom.¹

There was also a certain level of secrecy that went along with membership in the LYL, some of it almost comical decades later. Kaplow recalls that league members were assigned to teams, and even among other students he socialized with and suspected of LYL membership, it was understood that he should not ask for confirmation. Another LYL member, Saul Landau, also remembers that members were divided into groups, or cells, as a result of the Communist Party’s fear that a severe government crackdown was right around the corner. Landau was recruited into the league in the early fifties by a housemate, Henry Wortis, who would leave copies of communist newspapers and magazines in the bathroom—an “obvious but effective” ploy, according to Landau. The League’s secrecy also held a particular allure: on Sunday mornings, as Landau describes it, “Henry would put on his trench coat, ask me to feed his dog if, for some reason, he didn’t get back in time, and then mysteriously leave the house, often turning his head several times to check that no one was following him.”²

In many ways, the league’s existence in Madison highlights the conflicting trends at the University of Wisconsin. Throughout the country, the domestic anticommunism of these years had a powerful impact on student activism and politics; many observers noted that young Americans seemed more risk-averse, while campus politics was a generally quiet affair. Still, the Labor Youth League and a few other groups in the late 1940s and 1950s maintained a politics that defied the era’s currents. Kaplow bemoans the amount of time that the league spent defending itself rather than pushing a more positive program, but it is an accomplishment in itself that the group persevered throughout some of the most difficult postwar years. Read against the context of McCarthyism, Kaplow’s statement that the LYL “was a holding operation against consensus and conformity, and the silence to which they gave rise” indicates a certain degree of success. While much of the nation, including the overwhelming majority of university students, moved closer to the political center during the postwar decades, Kaplow and others like him served as a powerful reminder of an alternative perspective to the increasingly entrenched Cold War consensus.³

The university, too, played an important role in the political activism of the Labor Youth League, and a few years later such campus groups as the Madison-based Student Peace Center and Socialist Club. Though the university ultimately produced a mixed record when it came to protecting the rights of radical student groups and allowing controversial speakers to use campus facilities, Wisconsin remained committed to at least a partial defense of civil liberties, free speech, and free student association. Again and again in the late 1940s and 1950s, even as many other universities were bowing to the substantial pressures of domestic anticommunism, pressures that were even more intense for public institutions, Wisconsin affirmed the rights of politically unpopular student organizations. In doing so, it drew on a long tradition, dating back at least to the late nineteenth century, of campus support for academic freedom and critical inquiry. While Cold War–era administrators had little sympathy for communism or other radical political ideas, they believed that the best way to combat radicalism was to bring it in the open, to let it compete (and lose, they believed) in the marketplace of ideas.

The institutional space in Madison and in scattered other universities meant that even as higher education played an increasingly important role in the nation’s struggle with the Soviet Union, universities were also emerging as centers of dissent against the Cold War. In 1950s Madison, one of the most important developments within the small community of radical students was the break from the Old Left and the anticipation of something new, even if the development of the New Left was still a few years away. Jeffry Kaplow, like Saul Landau and Henry Wortis, represented an important stream of students that fed into the Madison political left—East Coast, Jewish, and with connections to older organizations that provided a conduit of radicalism when oppositional politics were in sharp decline—and these students mixed with Wisconsin’s political traditions and many of the state’s own best students to explore new directions. While the Labor Youth League in particular remained closely tied to the Communist Party in the early 1950s, students in Madison would create organizations in the middle and later years of the decade that were independent of any national organizations and that embraced ideological diversity as well as fledgling efforts toward direct action and a cultural politics that pointed toward the future. It would be a few more years before there existed a recognizable new left, but the developments in Madison in the middle and late fifties, in addition to the more general critique of the Cold War that persevered even at the height of McCarthyism, laid an important foundation for the more powerful movement to come.⁴

The Cold War had important consequences for the political and cultural climate of higher education in the fifties. Despite significant opposition, many American campuses had been politically active in the years before World War II, especially in the 1930s. The socialist Student League for Industrial Democracy and the communist National Student League represented much of the campus left during the early 1930s, and the two organizations merged in 1935 to form the American Student Union, which claimed twenty thousand members at its 1939 peak even as it faced investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC, then known as the Dies Committee for its leader, Texas representative Martin Dies Jr.). A variety of youth groups on and off campus were involved in coordinating antiwar rallies, including the 1935 National Student Strike Against War that drew 175,000 people across the country to protest militarism and to mark the anniversary of America’s entry into World War I, and Madison, too, saw peace rallies throughout the middle and late 1930s. A group called the Peace Federation sponsored a 1940 antiwar rally in Madison that drew eight hundred students, while one of the era’s most important campus groups was the University League for Liberal Action, which was affiliated with the American Student Union. The group’s suspected communist ties drew considerable concern in Madison and throughout the state, but the university resisted calls to crack down, even when the group hosted the American Student Union’s national convention in 1939 and invited Communist Party leader Earl Browder to speak.⁵

After the lull in campus activity brought on by the war, the emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s had a deadening effect on all kinds of campus political activity, especially activity on the left. Americans had always viewed communism with suspicion, and the investigations by HUAC and President Truman’s 1947 government loyalty program further established domestic anti-communism as a powerful force in American life. Wielded by many, but perhaps most adeptly by Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph McCarthy, whose name became synonymous with the virulence of the period after his 1950 emergence onto the national stage, domestic anti-communism meant a significant narrowing of the political and cultural spectrum. In a sense, many Americans hunkered down in the face of the perceived threat from the Soviet Union, rallying around traditional American values and norms and agreeing that it was no longer acceptable to question the fundamental truth of American principles, including capitalism and the righteousness of American foreign policy. While the Cold War overlay the era’s politics, culture, and even family life, those who challenged the emerging consensus were shunted to the margins and viewed with increasing suspicion.⁶

During these years, many Americans noted that university students were more conformist than they had been in the past and were less willing to challenge the status quo. In a lengthy 1951 article, the New York Times surveyed seventy-two major colleges and found that “a subtle, creeping paralysis of freedom of thought and speech is attacking college campuses in many parts of the country, limiting both students and faculty in the area traditionally reserved for the free exploration of knowledge and truth.” In addition to the general fear and uncertainty in American life at the time, the Times noted that many students feared being labeled a communist, a label that could carry social disapproval as well as rejection for further study or employment. Some analysts also found that students seemed more interested in earning a living than in rocking the boat. A 1949 poll of graduating seniors by Fortune magazine led to the conclusion that “forty-nine is taking no chances.” Above all else, the poll found that students prized security and abhorred risk, remarking that “they seem, to a stranger from another generation, somehow curiously old before their time.” Fortune especially decried the lack of entrepreneurial spirit: security meant working for other people, and the good life, as these graduating seniors saw it, was calm and ordered: a comfortable home, a good wife, three children, one or two cars.⁷

Other writers in the 1950s highlighted similar trends. William Whyte and Paul Goodman both wrote much-discussed works on conformity (Goodman’s book was actually published in 1960), and sociologist David Riesman became instantly famous for his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, cowritten with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. Reisman postulated the existence of different character types and argued that, in the late 1940s, the “other-directed person”—flexible and accommodating, wanting to be loved rather than esteemed—was coming to dominate American society. Considering young people in particular, Riesman came to many of the same conclusions as Fortune when he analyzed interviews of graduating seniors done by Time magazine in 1955: students, Riesman suggested, were in a hurry, not because of ambition, but because they had already made up their minds where they were heading. Often self-consciously contrasting themselves with their fathers, who had gone out on their own, seniors going into business indicated their preference for going to work for a large corporation. Moreover, their lack of ambition in work mirrored their already laid plans for marriage, family, and home.⁸

At Wisconsin, there were clear signs that some of the vitality that had marked the campus in the 1930s was missing. Heightened anticommunism meant that the act of participating in a demonstration or joining an organization like the Labor Youth League brought with it a clear set of risks, and some members of radical groups even reported harassment and intimidation from their fellow students. Some examples of activism akin to that of the 1930s or 1960s stand out, but these were few and far between. Testifying to the changed campus mood, all nineteen of the students who staged a relatively tame protest at a 1950 ROTC event, holding signs opposing militarism and compulsory ROTC, were officially disciplined by the university. The university’s Committee on Student Conduct concluded that while students had rights to free speech and protest, these did not extend to the disruption of official campus events. Dave Trubek, a student in Madison from 1953 until 1957 and active in liberal, though not leftist, politics, also experienced the consequences of even casual associations with radical campus groups. He found himself in especially hot water when he signed up for a military commission and indicated on his loyalty oath that he had attended a campus concert sponsored by the Labor Youth League and featuring Pete Seeger, the popular leftist folk singer. For this he faced hours of interrogation with military intelligence officials from Washington, D.C.; they asked him “about every possible person I’d ever met,” including his father, who was active in Democratic Party politics.⁹

University observers regularly commented on the lack of campus political activism during these years. For Cardinal writer Karl Meyer, the late 1940s decline of the campus chapter of American Youth for Democracy, a group that had come under attack locally and nationally for its communist ties, indicated the “withering campus left,” while the editors of the Wisconsin Athenaean, the campus literary magazine, offered one of the most scathing critiques of UW students and their lack of political involvement. In a 1951 editorial titled “Generation of Jellyfish,” they catalogued some of the symptoms of conformity on campus, including the lack of attendance for important campus speakers, a general lack of knowledge about international issues, and a “hapless” student government. “The worst part of it is that we aren’t even curious,” the editors bemoaned. Describing a theoretical graduation ceremony, they directed their frustration at “future leaders”: “For the most part, they are a sterile assemblage of prisoners of orthodoxy. A group with little curiosity, content to munch chocolates and watch a television set while the rest of the world staggers blindly to destruction, a group hungry for a rut to cower in, a collection of youngsters already middle-aged, lulled by life into a state of vegetative smugness.”¹⁰

The editors at the Daily Cardinal often echoed the same sentiments. A 1953 editorial noted the “deadening” silence at the beginning of the school year: students continued to complain about “the inequities of existence,” but fewer were willing to do anything about it, a trend the paper suggested had been growing since the end of World War II. In 1957, the Cardinal noted that “students attending university today are primarily interested in security and little else. … The vast majority has not ventured out of its protective shell since the beginning of the year.” It did not go unnoticed, moreover, that campus politics excited very little attention; in 1955, almost three times as many students cast ballots in the election for prom queen than in the election for student government. And indicative of the times, perhaps the most significant problems that administrators faced in terms of student behavior were springtime panty raids and water fights. In 1958, a particularly bad year, two days of water fights and panty raids resulted in numerous students arrested for unlawful assembly. The police used tear gas to break up the crowd—a sign, perhaps, of things to come.¹¹

Ironically, even as the Cold War was often blamed for the absence of youthful activism, one of the criticisms aimed at students was that they lacked interest in Cold War issues. Observers at the University of Wisconsin were often critical of their fellow students for not being informed about international events, and David Riesman’s mid-1950s analysis concluded that America’s graduating seniors showed little concern over the international situation. Yet even as students were not always well versed in the details of the Cold War—the status of the NATO alliance or the ratio of U.S. to Soviet Union gross national product—this does not mean that the Cold War was unimportant to them. The immediacy of the threat of war and atomic destruction faded some with time, but many youth still recognized the possibility of nuclear war and the threat of destruction that continued to loom. The war scares of the late 1940s and the fears of nuclear fallout in the 1950s; the pervasiveness of the Cold War in popular culture, as in movies like Them!, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Blob; the regular discussion of civil liberties and academic freedom in the context of McCarthyism—these were just some of the ways in which the Cold War penetrated youth’s consciousness.¹²

Certainly the concern among youth for security was a close corollary to the international insecurity of these years. In 1957, Dave Trubek, then editor of the campus literary magazine, made a direct connection between McCarthyism and students’ desire to “play it smart,” to stick to opinions that “are safe and wholesome, to say nothing that isn’t already a cliche.” The root of campus conformity, he suggested, was fear: “The main trouble with us is we’re just plain scared. We are scared of the world we are entering and we have crawled into conformity to avoid meeting it.” The questions surrounding war and the future of the world weighed particularly heavy: “We have nothing but the specter of a world on the brink of disaster, a world frequently too complex for us to understand. … Our past has become an academic question, our present a visceral reaction to too much reality, our future only a wavering, inconstant question mark.”¹³

Finally, in a particularly perceptive analysis, prominent UW political science professor David Fellman highlighted the broad pressures exerted by the Cold War and their equally expansive impact on college youth. In a 1958 radio conversation between Fellman, sociology professor Howard Becker, and English professor Frederick Hoffman, the three agreed that the campus was more conformist than it had been in the past. While Becker suggested that many of the fights of the 1920s and 1930s had little substance and that there remained few issues of consequence to excite student political activism, Fellman, an expert on civil liberties and chair of the American Association of University Professors from 1959 to 1964, attributed the lack of campus political activity directly to the Cold War. Whether the result of a real shift in opinions or merely students’ prudence in avoiding the consequences of unorthodox political activity, Fellman argued, the Cold War had significantly shaped campus life. Some students were more likely to moderate their views in recognition of the possible consequences, while the tensions and insecurities of the Cold War meant a kind of closing of ranks that precluded certain kinds of political thought and behavior. “As a society feels insecurity,” he declared, “it tends to close ranks and tighten up its discipline and simply will not put up with certain marginal forms of political behavior.” As Fellman understood, the Cold War was much more than readying soldiers for combat; for most Americans it was a clash of civilizations, and with so much at stake, there was little room for dissent at home.¹⁴

There was more than a little truth to all of the reports about student conformity, in Wisconsin and across the nation, but despite the deadening effect of domestic anticommunism, there were at least some corners of the nation, and some parts of the University of Wisconsin, where student activism remained alive, if perhaps subdued. Even with all of the handwringing over the so-called silent generation, a small group of Wisconsin students made quite a bit of “noise” in the context of the McCarthy period. There were few of the protests that had marked the 1930s and would re-emerge with even more force in the 1960s, but students in the 1950s challenged the status quo with a politics that was often unorthodox and was sometimes even radical. Belying the notion of a sharp break between the politics of the fifties and sixties, this activism helps to explain why Madison was one of the first places where a recognizable new left emerged in the early 1960s and why the campus continued to be on the leading edge of radical politics throughout much of the era.

Between 1945, the year that World War II ended, and 1965, when Madison’s New Left broke into a full-fledged campus movement, a large number of student organizations offered a counter to the political narrowing brought on by domestic anticommunism. Some of these were outright communist in their orientation, others claimed a socialist, noncommunist ideology, and still others stood in various places from liberal to left. They reflected in some ways the status of the political left throughout the country, which had experienced significant success in the 1930s and during World War II but faced increasingly difficult times as the nation sank into the Cold War. On the national level in the 1950s, the left consisted of a number of organizations, like the American Communist Party and the Committee for Non-Violent Action (a pacifist organization), that were battered by the forces of McCarthyism. In Madison, the most important groups included two that were affiliated with the Communist Party, American Youth for Democracy (AYD), which existed from 1945 to 1949, and the Labor Youth League (LYL), from 1950 to 1956, as well as two groups that were independent of any national organizations and that would last into the middle 1960s, the Student Peace Center (SPC), established in 1955, and the Socialist Club, established in 1957. Like national groups on the political left, these organizations were often embroiled in controversy, but they still managed to stand at the center of a meaningful discourse over American foreign policy, civil liberties, and civil rights that emerged well before the 1960s and before the Vietnam War highlighted the cracks in the Cold War.¹⁵

In terms of actual numbers, radical campus organizations were relatively small; on a campus with between ten and twenty thousand students in the 1950s, and more than thirty thousand by the middle 1960s, leftist students remained a considerable minority. American Youth for Democracy listed more than sixty students in its 1945 application for university registration, a respectable membership for a campus organization, but this was the exception and was before the emergence of McCarthyism as a powerful force in American politics and on campus. In most instances, leftist groups claimed no more than a few dozen members, and the number of active members was sometimes even smaller. When the Student Peace Center was established in 1955, it listed eight members in its application; the Socialist Club claimed twenty-one at its beginning a couple of years later. The most controversial of all these groups, the Labor Youth League, was also small. While the Peace Center and Socialist Club grew over time, the Labor Youth League’s membership, hard to pin down because of the group’s secrecy, seems to have been in the range of fifteen to twenty-five students for most of its existence. Needless to say, these groups were influential despite, rather than because of, their numbers.¹⁶

While each of these groups possessed an individual outlook, all of them were drawn together in their commitment to a fundamental rethinking of American society and politics and especially in their challenge to America’s Cold War policies. Other campus groups came and went throughout these years, sometimes in the course of a year or two, but even as groups like Students for Democratic Action, a student chapter of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action; Robin Hood’s Merry Men, an anti-McCarthy organization; and occasionally even the Young Democrats worked on a variety of liberal issues and sometimes bucked the political conventions of the postwar decades, these groups rarely went so far as to challenge the accepted truths of the Cold War. More radical groups, in contrast, defied the prevailing winds of domestic anti-communism, which sometimes blew strongly even in relatively liberal Madison. Rarely backing away from controversy, and perhaps even inviting it at times, they pushed a persistent critique of the Cold War at home and abroad.

Reflecting the course of events in the postwar decades, students at Wisconsin highlighted an alternate view of the Cold War’s beginnings and a critical assessment of America’s continuing role in the world. For American Youth for Democracy, this meant calling on the Truman administration to halt its gradual but unmistakable drift into the Cold War as well as challenging the widespread belief that it was the Soviet Union that was poisoning international relations. In the first couple of years after the end of World War II, the group supported “Big Three” unity (United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union), and in 1946, it condemned as “war-mongering” Winston Churchill’s bellicose rhetoric against the Soviet Union. As the reality of the Cold War set in, AYD pointed more and more to the United Nations as a solution to worsening East-West relations, and in 1948, it enthusiastically supported the campaign of former vice-president and third-party presidential candidate Henry Wallace.¹⁷

AYD’s positions became increasingly out of step with mainstream American opinion in the late 1940s, but the Labor Youth League took an even more critical perspective on U.S. foreign policy. Though its program was sometimes limited to publishing broadsides and hosting controversial speakers, this was more than enough to stir the generally calm waters of campus politics, with the group’s speakers sometimes attracting large crowds and usually generating coverage in the campus newspaper. In the early 1950s, the league waded into the Korean crisis, denying Soviet involvement and criticizing the United States for raising the threat of atomic war on the Korean peninsula. The LYL also pointed a finger squarely at the United States for starting and maintaining the Cold War: “The great danger of a 3rd world war comes not from the Soviet Union—but from American imperialism,” a league publication declared. “[American] provocation of armed conflict in Korea is the most brutal and vicious attempt to make the Soviet Union appear guilty for the Cold War.”¹⁸

Following the dissolution of the Labor Youth League in 1956, which coincided with Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin-era atrocities and the shockwaves this news sent through the Communist Party worldwide, the newly formed Socialist Club remained critical of American foreign policy even as it avoided the reflexive criticism of the United States and support for the Soviet Union that had often animated the league. In 1958, the group was active in its opposition to U.S. intervention in Lebanon, and when Venezuelans demonstrated in massive numbers upon Vice-President Richard Nixon’s visit to Venezuela that same year, the club pointed to the protests as a direct result of flawed U.S. policy in Latin America. A few years later, in 1961, the group endured considerable harassment from anti-Castro students when it led the campus opposition to U.S. policy on Cuba, circulating a petition critical of American policy and holding a protest rally against America’s role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Finally, in October 1963, the Socialist Club was one of the key groups to put together a campus demonstration against the U.S. role in Vietnam, the first Madison protest to raise the issue of Vietnam and part of a nationwide campaign that fall.¹⁹

Another group that sponsored the 1963 anti-Vietnam rally was the Student Peace Center. Generally avoiding the controversy that avowedly Marxist organizations attracted, the group’s activities highlighted its opposition to militarism and, more specifically, to an American foreign policy that emphasized the buildup of arms and the willingness to use military power throughout the world. It would be active in campus protests against nuclear testing and civil defense in the early 1960s, often teaming with another group, Students for Peace and Disarmament, that had ties to the national Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), and it was perhaps most famous for its Anti-Military Balls, held annually beginning in 1957. On the night following the Military Ball, traditionally one of the university’s most important social functions of the year, the Anti-Military Ball was meant to counter what the SPC saw as the glorification of the military on campus. With skits and antiwar songs, the dance drew hundreds of students by the end of the 1950s and became a campus event in its own right.²⁰

The group also played an important role in continuing the fight against compulsory ROTC. ROTC had long been an issue on campus, but despite regular discussions in the campus newspaper, debate within the student government, and occasional student referenda on the issue (one such referendum, in 1958, had to be thrown out because campus women had accidentally been allowed to vote at some polling places), it was not until the late 1950s that the move to shift ROTC from a compulsory to a voluntary system gained any traction with the university’s administration. While universities had long worked closely with the military on ROTC, with higher education officials recognizing their role in the Cold War as well as the potential of ROTC to provide a civilian “check” on military power, a compulsory system no longer seemed necessary to many. When the Peace Center held a 1957 protest against compulsory ROTC, it generated little of the controversy that a similar protest had engendered in 1950, and when the military made it clear in the late 1950s that it did not believe a compulsory system necessary for national defense, this opened the door to changes at many universities, including Wisconsin. The state legislature, the faculty, and the Board of Regents all agreed to move to a voluntary system in 1960, with the issue largely disappearing, at least until the late 1960s. At that time, activists would call for the complete removal of ROTC from the Madison campus, arguing that ROTC was one more link between the university and the government’s engagement in the war in Vietnam.²¹

In addition to these groups providing a source of political dissent during the years that McCarthyism held powerful sway in America, another outstanding feature of each of the organizations, and one that did not go unnoticed by their critics, was that their membership included a large number of Jewish students, with many coming from New York and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the East Coast. Of the sixty members whose home towns were listed on AYD’s 1945 registration form, for example, thirty-seven were from New York, five from New Jersey, and four from Chicago; six were from Wisconsin. Two years later, the newly elected officers included Henry Elson, Bronx; Elaine Utahl, New York City; Anita Kaufman, Wisconsin Rapids; and Laura Parmet, Brooklyn. In the Labor Youth League and Socialist Club, too, a similar pattern held true. Based on the university’s compilation of the known members of LYL between 1950 and 1953 (the group was only required to list its officers on its registration form and many members continued to keep their identity secret), seven of the ten members were from New York, including four from Brooklyn, while the other three were from Wisconsin. And though the 1950 campus protest against ROTC was not sponsored by any particular organization, it also included many out-of-state students: of the twenty students listed in one university document, seven were from Wisconsin, six from New York, two from New Jersey, two from Illinois, and one each from Kansas, Iowa, and Ontario, Canada.²²

While not all East Coast students were Jewish, many were, with their presence on campus and their involvement in radical student politics continuing a pattern that had started near the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawn to Wisconsin because it lacked the quotas and admission restrictions in place at many other universities, Jews made up as much as 10 percent of the student body in the 1920s and 1930s, and they continued to come to Madison even after many East Coast universities removed their admission restrictions in the 1940s and 1950s. Official enrollment figures from these years show that New York was the source of the second greatest number of out-of-state students in Madison, after Illinois, and many students were encouraged by friends or relatives who had attended in earlier decades or were attracted by Wisconsin’s reputation as a first-rate and politically active school. Buttressed also by a growing number of Jews who came from Wisconsin and other parts of the country, Madison had an active Jewish student community. The campus chapter of the national Menorah Society was established in 1911, while Jewish fraternities and sororities thrived. In 1925, Wisconsin was the second campus in the nation to establish a chapter of Hillel, an organization that provided a social and religious center for Jewish students who were far from their home communities and that is still active on campus today.²³

Yet even as the lack of restrictive admission policies contributed to a growing Jewish population at Wisconsin, anti-Semitism was still commonplace, and the campus divide between non-Jews and Jews became a significant cleavage for many years. Housing restrictions were pervasive and Greek life was divided, but it was the association with radical student politics that received particular attention, with anti-Semitism and anti-radicalism often blending together easily. While there were some contrasting voices, including that of UW business manager A. W. Peterson, who argued in 1948 that the university’s greatness depended on its cosmopolitan student body, many believed that the campus would be a better place if there were fewer “New Yorkers” (a common euphemism). Some of this emerged during student protests—Dave Trubek and Paul Breines recall being told that they should “go back to New York” during protests against Joe McCarthy and lunch counter segregation, respectively—but it also came from university and, especially, state government officials. In 1940, as controversy over campus radicals was at a high point, campus Dean of Men Scott Goodnight assured listeners on a local radio station that only a tiny fraction of the student body were communists, so few that they “could be put in one end of a box car for convenient shipment back to New York.” Various other efforts to restrict out-of-state student enrollment were also tinged with anti-Semitism. Governor Oscar Rennebohm slammed New York and New Jersey students after the 1950 ROTC protest (though he later backtracked on his statement), while Republican state assemblyman Nile Soik angrily drew public attention to the high number of out-of-state students who had signed a 1961 petition calling for the dissolution of the House Un-American Activities Committee. A few years later, Republican assemblyman Harold Froehlich would draw on this same tradition as he called for more restrictive admission policies for out-of-state students after the 1966 draft sit-in.²⁴

While Jews were prominent in many radical student groups, the Student Peace Center provides at least one partial exception to the pattern. Established in 1955, the SPC was founded not by Jews from out-of-state, but by a group of avowedly Christian students, most of them from Wisconsin, whose early meetings were held in the campus’s Baptist Student Center. At least some of them were pacifists, and they affiliated from the beginning with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that was committed to working for peace and social justice. Indeed, the SPC highlights the involvement of committed Christian students in liberal and sometimes even radical causes. The campus YMCA and Baptist Club were among those involved in human rights and civil liberties issues in the 1950s, and one 1956 gathering at the campus YMCA in support of the Montgomery bus boycott included members of the Baptist Club, the Student Peace Center, the campus NAACP, and even a few students, according to the Daily Cardinal, “from left-wing reformist groups not usually associated with a meeting of prayer.” More broadly, adult religious leaders on campus were often supportive of civil liberties and racial equality, a trend that continued into the 1960s despite being overshadowed by that era’s more activist students. Reverend George Collins, of the Student Baptist Center, was a founding member of the Madison NAACP in 1943 and declared in 1955 that “the Christian gospel demands the practice of brotherly relations in every area of life.”²⁵

Despite the SPC’s origins, however, it was only a few years later that the group’s membership more closely resembled that of other radical campus groups. Ellamae Calvert, a Methodist student from Benton, Wisconsin, who had established the SPC, was among the early members who graduated and moved on, while the new students who joined the Peace Center and carried it into the late fifties and sixties often came from different backgrounds. In the mid-fifties, Jim Sipple and Ned Cochrane, both SPC members, had applied for conscientious objector status based on their Christian beliefs, but when another SPC member, Ken Knudson, applied for the same status in 1959, his objections were moral and political, not religious (though Knudson was from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and not from the East Coast).

Another sign of the change was the election of Nina Serrano to chair the SPC in 1957. A New York Jew, she was friends with some of the early members of SPC and remembers being elected despite rejecting the pacifism of many of the other members. She was typical of the new members in that she belonged to other radical campus groups, and by the end of the 1950s, there would be considerable overlap between the Peace Center and the Socialist Club in particular. Serrano, Martin Pierce (Huntington, New York), Edward Beals (Wichita), Arthur Hack (Brooklyn), Saul Landau (Bronx), Matt Chapperon (Roslyn Heights, New York), and Marshall Brickman (Brooklyn) were just some of those who were involved in both groups in the late fifties, while some of them had also been members of LYL before it dissolved in 1956. The connections were so transparent that the Peace Center’s faculty adviser, soils science professor and Quaker activist Francis Hole, considered withdrawing from his advising role in 1960. In a letter to then-chairman Dick Lerner (Brooklyn), Hole acknowledged the hard work put into the organization by members of the Socialist Club, but he expressed concern that the SPC lacked participation by students from campus religious centers and from AFSC, with which the Peace Center was still technically affiliated. As he saw it, the SPC had an increasingly narrow outlook, and its continued affiliation with AFSC was a convenience rather than a genuine commitment to the Friends’ principles.²⁶

East Coast Jews were undoubtedly overrepresented in radical student groups, but this does not mean that these organizations should be dismissed as the sole creation of New Yorkers or as the tools of Old Left groups that continued to operate in New York and some of the country’s other urban centers. Although this was exactly the view taken by many of these groups’ critics, Wisconsin had its own radical traditions, based in turn-of-the-century Progressivism as well as the continuing strength of the Socialist Party in Milwaukee. It was these traditions, in part, that attracted many out-of-state students in the first place. Moreover, there were always a number of students who did not fit the profile of the radical New York Jew; there were many campus leftists who came from Wisconsin—such as Ted and Andrea Cloak, Franklynn Peterson, Lee Baxandall, and Ken Knudson, to name just a few—and there were many others who came from Illinois or other parts of the Midwest. Finally, there were always many more New York and East Coast Jews who were not involved in radical campus politics than those who were. Suggesting the tension that sometimes emerged between Jews involved in radical politics and those who were not, Henry Wortis, a well-known member of LYL in the middle fifties, remembers finding himself in the doorway of a store near campus with another Jewish student from New York. After a few minutes of silence, the other student, a member of the UW Young Democrats, turned to Wortis: it was students like Wortis, he said, that gave all New York Jews a bad reputation.²⁷

Moreover, even for the many Jews involved in radical politics in Madison, the role of Jewishness is complex and difficult to unravel. For most Jews on the left, being Jewish had more cultural than religious content, an outgrowth of a specific social and political environment that was more closely identified with the union hall than the synagogue. As immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who had settled in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other large cities, Jews had joined the American working class and had taken prominent roles in the developing labor union movement, including its sometimes radical politics. As many second- and third-generation Jews in particular replaced the religious devotion of their immigrant parents and grandparents with an activist politics, the Jewish community was often bound together by unions, newspapers, and even summer camps that supported a kind of cultural or ethnic Judaism. Many Jews who grew up in the post-World War II decades had community and often family ties to leftist politics; at least some had seen the effects of McCarthyism close up and had come of age with a lasting distrust of mainstream American politics.²⁸

The complex meanings of Jewish identity and its relationship to leftist politics emerges in the memories of Wisconsin students from this era. For Paul Breines, who grew up in New York but with few leftist connections, it was in Madison where he first felt Jewish. Of becoming active in the UW Socialist Club, he recalls that, “becoming a leftist, that was becoming a Jew for me.” Roz Baxandall (then Roz Fraad), on the other hand, remembers that her Jewish identity, a product of her leftist upbringing in New York, was challenged by other Jewish students in Madison. Rooming with two girls from Chicago who observed traditional Jewish holidays and understood their Jewish identity in religious rather than political terms, “these Midwestern, nouveau riche gals were my introduction to American Judaism.” “I’d assumed I was Jewish” she remembers, but it was only at this time that she became conscious that her parents were actually atheists.²⁹

Franklynn Peterson’s story offers another interesting twist on the ways that Jewishness played in the New Left’s radical politics. Raised in a small Wisconsin mill town, Peterson quickly found his way to radical campus politics after he arrived in Madison in the fall of 1956. Even as he was elected to lead the Socialist Club in 1960, however, a fact that he credits to his working-class background and, as he tells it, his “straight nose” (qualities that were prized by a group that was self-conscious about its largely middle-class background and eager to have a non-Jew as its public face), he was also in the process of leaving behind his Lutheran background. In a development that he says “amused” the friends he was making on the left, he started to hang around the campus Hillel chapter, a place where many Jewish students gathered but that most leftist Jews either ignored or scorned. Peterson would continue to explore Judaism while he was a student, converting later in life, and he would marry Gail Bernstein, a New Jersey Jew and another member of the Socialist Club. Interestingly, it would be Bernstein’s Orthodox grandparents, rather than Bernstein or her likewise secular parents, who introduced him to a variety of Jewish religious traditions.³⁰

Without oversimplifying the complexities of Jewish involvement in radical movements, many Jews understood their Jewishness as rooted in an activist, and usually leftist, politics. Investigating the differences in post-World War II political culture among New York City’s Jewish and Catholic populations, historian Joshua Zeitz suggests that although Catholics often promoted obedience to authority, many Jews grew up in homes that prized intellectual freedom, with dissent identified as a core element of Jewishness. Sociologist Rebecca Klatch makes similar observations about the role of Jewishness in sixties-era activist politics. In interviews with Jewish members of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest of the New Left organizations, she found that while few Jewish activists had a religious upbringing, they still had a strong cultural Jewish identity. The Holocaust sometimes shaped their politics, a recent and powerful reminder of the effects of oppression, and anti-Semitism also reinforced their position outside of the American mainstream. Jews were active in New Left politics around the country: they played an important role in the development of Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1960s and made up perhaps a third of the students who were involved in Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964. In Madison, Jews were crucial to a radical community that blended East and West, Jew and non-Jew, and that provided a crucial conduit of radicalism, especially in the early development of the New Left.³¹

The emergence in Madison of a potent critique of the Cold War owed much to the dynamic mix of students who came to Madison in the 1950s and 1960s, but it must also be recognized as a legacy of the University of Wisconsin’s commitment to free speech and its relatively broad tolerance of dissent. Even as there was an individual component to the unorthodox campus politics of the 1950s and early 1960s, then, there was also an institutional context to the maintenance of a radical campus politics during the height of the McCarthy years. Universities across the nation faced scrutiny from domestic anticommunists, especially as higher education became increasingly central to the nation’s security, and public universities like Wisconsin, dependent for much of their funding on the goodwill of state legislatures, were especially affected. At the UW, postwar presidents E. B. Fred, Conrad Elvehjem, and Fred Harvey Harrington could not ignore the potential backlash over radical student activity in Madison, and they ultimately produced a mixed record, balancing an institutional commitment to civil liberties and academic freedom with the realities of the Cold War era. Still, while many other universities were seriously narrowing or eliminating the opportunities for radical or even unorthodox student activity, Wisconsin stands out for its relative tolerance of radical student groups and speakers, maintaining a space for serious and open discussion that defied mainstream political currents.

In the postwar years, the university was already drawing on a long tradition of vigorous and open debate, even in the face of public controversy. This tradition dated back at least to 1894 and the controversy surrounding economics professor Richard T. Ely, who had been hired two years earlier as director of the School of Economics, Politics, and History. Ely was accused of supporting strikes and boycotts, an incendiary charge in the late nineteenth century and one that received national coverage in the Nation, New York’s Evening Post, and other publications. The accusation from Wisconsin superintendent of public instruction Oliver Wells led to a thorough investigation, and even though it soon became clear that Ely would be exonerated, the university’s Board of Regents decided to use the opportunity to make public its broad support for free inquiry in the university community. “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere,” the regents declared that year, “we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.” This support for “sifting and winnowing” would quickly become a source of pride for the university, captured on a plaque attached to the university’s main building, Bascom Hall, in 1910, featured prominently in every issue of the Daily Cardinal, and still referenced by many on the campus today.³²

More importantly, the university’s commitment would be affirmed in practice during the first half of the twentieth century. As early as 1922, when controversy arose over the use of university facilities by several well-known radical speakers, the Board of Regents repeated its 1894 statement and specifically approved the campus invitation of socialist writer Upton Sinclair and former Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs (Debs had also been incarcerated for two years after the end of World War I for violating the Espionage Act). Several years later, UW President Glenn Frank issued a strong statement in favor of the faculty’s right to academic freedom, while his successor, Clarence Dykstra, would similarly defend the rights of student groups as scrutiny of radical student organizations developed in the late 1930s. With some in Madison and throughout the state criticizing the communist leanings of the University League for Liberal Action, Dykstra was among those who came to the group’s defense, issuing a statement to the American Legion, a regular critic of campus radicals, that “intolerance is like an epidemic.” Dykstra would also be involved in several controversies in the late 1940S after he left Wisconsin and took over as the provost at the University of California, Los Angeles; because of his willingness to allow controversial speakers on the UCLA campus, he became a regular target of domestic anticommunists.³³

These events in Madison’s history set the tone for later confrontations, but the Cold War era placed even greater pressure on higher education, with the first salvo in the struggle over the reach of domestic anticommunism at Wisconsin coming just a few years after the end of World War II. Even though the term “McCarthyism” had not yet been coined, its champions in Wisconsin were already gathering force, and at the center of the controversy was Madison’s chapter of American Youth for Democracy, a group that had been established nationally in 1945 as the youth group of the Communist Party. The Wisconsin chapter, for its part, claimed publicly that it was a “progressive” organization and was open to anyone accepting its program, but the group’s postwar criticisms of U.S. foreign policy were more than enough to arouse suspicion. HUAC had already accused the national organization of being a communist front, and when U.S. attorney general Tom Clark included AYD on the government’s list of subversive organizations in December 1947, the same month the campus chapter invited suspected communists Gerhard Eisler and Carl Marzani to speak, suspicion turned into outright condemnation. Though UW administrators denied that politics was involved, they quickly turned down the requests for the speakers, citing the fact that both were under criminal investigation: Eisler was facing charges for contempt of Congress and perjury while Marzani was appealing a conviction for lying about his association with the Communist Party while an employee of the federal government during World War II.³⁴

Wisconsin was not the only university to struggle with its chapter of AYD and the question of controversial speakers. Many universities, including the University of Colorado, Brooklyn College, Temple University, and the University of Michigan, simply banned the group altogether, while Michigan also joined others in keeping controversial speakers off campus. Berkeley had already severely limited student political activity in the 1930s in response to the emergence of communist-influenced groups, but many universities tightened their policies in the immediate postwar years. Some used membership list requirements, a tactic specifically recommended by the House Un-American Activities Committee, as a way to pressure student organizations; groups at many campuses simply folded under the requirement to publicly disclose all of their members. According to Ellen Schrecker, a historian of the McCarthy era’s effect on higher education, the result of many universities’ efforts was that, by the early 1950s, ‘the student left was all but extinct on American campuses.”³⁵

At the UW, a state-supported institution and the pride of Wisconsin’s system of higher education, the possibility that there were communists on campus drew significant attention throughout the state. Alumni, parents, and newspaper editorial boards voiced their opinions, while some state legislators, who regularly wrangled over university budgets and policies, were particularly critical of any sign of campus radicalism. Indeed, even before the invitations to Marzani and Eisler, at least one state legislator was in contact with the university concerning the AYD chapter, highlighting again the concern about the role of out-of-state students in campus radicalism. Just as the state legislature was discussing the postwar enrollment crunch and a push by some lawmakers to restrict out-of-state students, Republican state senator Bernard Gettelman wrote to university officials in 1947 asking for information about AYD members. Dean of Students Paul Trump responded with a list of members, including their hometowns, and he noted that the status of AYD was currently under consideration by the UW’s administration and faculty.³⁶

As in other controversies, students made known their own opinions on the status of AYD and its efforts to bring radical speakers to campus. In a letter to the Daily Cardinal, one student slammed AYD for its suspected communist affiliations and, unsatisfied with the university’s denial that its decision to keep Eisler off campus had anything to do with his politics, argued that Eisler’s communist ties were more enough to ban him from campus. “Does a democrat have freedom of speech in a communist state?” he asked, repeating a refrain that would be used again and again by those opposing the use of university facilities by communists or suspected communists. According to this line of argument, there was no reason to provide the benefits and liberties of the American system to those who would plot to destroy that system. Two other UW students proposed a more straightforward solution to AYD’s invitation that winter: “Let AYD and Eisler convene out in the middle of Lake Mendota [ bordering the campus], and if the lake is not frozen over so much the better.”³⁷

But even as some lined up with the administration during the controversy over Eisler and Marzani, including the Cardinal’s editors and the majority of those who wrote letters to the paper, a number supported the rights of AYD. Bob Sollen, a Cardinal columnist and political science major from Michigan, accused AYD of creating controversy for the purpose of stirring up trouble, but he argued that it made no sense to fight AYD with its own methods: free speech was the only way to combat communism. Others expressing their dismay over the Eisler decision included the student government, which protested the university’s ruling, and at least two campus political organizations, Students for Democratic Action, a student affiliate of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and Young Progressive Citizens of America, which charged the university with setting a dangerous precedent in its denial of free speech for AYD.³⁸

Ultimately, the university’s record on AYD, like its record during much of this period, was mixed. In addition to turning down the speaker requests for Eisler and Marzani, the university also initiated efforts to impose a membership list requirement on student organizations. Like other universities, Wisconsin denied that the requirement, which would force student groups to list all of their members instead of just their officers on annual registration forms, was politically motivated, but few believed this claim. Predictably, groups like AYD and the John Cookson Marxist Discussion Club (formed in 1947) protested the new rule, with AYD president Bernard Herschel writing to Dean Trump that it was a matter of principle that students should be able to keep political affiliations private. Herschel also questioned the ways in which such a list might be used; in the context of the “witch-hunts and hysterical investigations [that] have become the order of the day,” he wrote, there was good reason for concern. Perhaps more importantly, other campus groups also raised their voices against the policy. In the weeks just prior to and after the deadline for submitting lists of members, Students for Democratic Action and the campus chapter of the liberal-leaning American Veterans Committee (AVC) criticized the policy, while the student government and the Cardinal expressed their opposition as well. In a letter to Trump, Ivan Nestingen, chair of AVC and later the mayor of Madison and undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, cited the policy’s detrimental effect on student freedom and asked the university to reconsider its position. Remarkably, the university did just that; although its precise reasoning remains unclear, the university reversed itself just a few weeks after the new policy was supposed to go into effect.³⁹

The university also took a lenient approach when it came to the broader question of AYD’s status as an officially recognized student organization. In a March 1947 letter to a colleague at the University of Colorado (where AYD was later banned), Dean Trump remarked that despite the uproar over the national organization, Wisconsin AYD followed the university’s regulations and was generally accepted by students and faculty as just another student political organization. Later that year, a proposed statement from the Student Life and Interests Committee (SLIC), which governed student organizations, declared that “freedom of choice on the basis of the interchange of student opinion is, the committee feels, symptomatic of democratic health and vitality on the campus.” Though declaring that university recognition did not imply approval and expressing concern that students understand the future implications of joining a group like AYD, the committee suggested that the best way to combat communism was not to censor it: “The committee has faith in the ability of the American form of government to prove its value through unlicensed competition in the free market of ideas—on the university campus, as well as elsewhere.”⁴⁰

Madison’s chapter of AYD closed its doors in 1949, along with the national organization, but the template that it established in the struggle over student political freedoms would play out with even more fervor in the controversy over the Labor Youth League, a group established in 1950 near the height of the hysteria over communism. The league replaced AYD as the youth group of the Communist Party (radical groups were often short-lived during these years, the result of repression as well as regular attempts by communists and others to reenergize their organizations), but it received the same kind of scrutiny from government officials as well as university administrators. Listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. attorney general and directed to register as a communist front organization by the Subversive Activities Control Board, a committee created by the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, the group was pressed around the country and, like AYD, banned on many campuses. Still, even as Wisconsin’s Joe McCarthy was making a name for himself as America’s leading anticommunist, Madison avoided the worst effects of the anticommunist fervor. The LYL’s existence in Madison was always precarious, but it still managed to maintain its university recognition throughout the early and middle 1950s; indeed, for a few years in the middle 1950s it was the only university-recognized Labor Youth League chapter in the entire country.

The LYL in Madison was a relatively small group, and though it occasionally attracted attention for its broadsides against American foreign policy and the controversial speakers it invited to campus, it wasn’t until January 1953, when it hosted Abner Berry, Negro affairs editor of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker newspaper, that it generated sustained controversy. While other speakers had prompted debate in the several years since Eisler and Marzani’s cancelled appearances, including former State Department adviser Owen Lattimore, who was invited by the university’s Union Forum Committee despite accusations by McCarthy and other anticommunists that he was a Soviet agent, Berry’s appearance hit a particularly sensitive chord. Republican state senator Gordon Bubolz, a conservative who represented McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton, took up the issue the day before Berry was to speak, pouncing on the university for harboring radicals and promising to investigate the presence of LYL on campus, a serious claim in the context of the early 1950s. His public attack set off a flurry of activity. President Fred responded the next day, explaining the university’s policies on student organizations and speakers and defending the rights of student organizations and their “freedom of inquiry,” while the Wisconsin Legislative Council, an arm of the state legislature, officially requested materials relating to the university’s rules on student organizations and speakers. What followed was a nearly year-long reevaluation of university policies that would test the resilience of state and university support for the student political freedoms that had existed in Madison for decades.⁴¹

As the university and the state legislature began their deliberations, Berry’s speech brought intensified discussion among students, too, with the campus Young Republicans (YGOP) initially leading the charge against the LYL. In the run up to Berry’s January speech, the group had resolved that the university should deny “university recognition and facilities to subversive organizations,” and in March, as the fallout from the speech continued, they called directly for a ban on the LYL. Writing for the group, John Fritschler, a law student from Superior, Wisconsin, and also chairman of the Midwest Federation of College YGOP Clubs, argued that free speech was a “responsibility,” one that the league abused. The Bill of Rights was not a “suicide pact,” Fritschler argued, and the civil liberties that the league clung to would not exist if communism were to triumph. The university should ban subversive groups because, as he put it, “one more Alger Hiss or Harry Gold is too much.” Later that year, as another controversial speaker appeared at the invitation of the LYL—Joseph Starobin, a former foreign editor of the Daily Worker who, among other things, warned students against U.S. involvement in Vietnam—a group of several student leaders sent a letter to President Fred again opposing the university’s sanctioning of communist groups and speakers. Signers of the letter included members of Wisconsin’s student government as well as leaders of such groups as the Young Republicans, the Badger Veterans Organization, and the Concerned League of Women Voters.⁴²

This controversy also points to the assertiveness of conservative students in campus politics. The YGOP was in the forefront of early efforts against potentially subversive speakers and organizations in Madison, but other groups often took up the conservative torch in later years, with the YGOP sometimes split between conservative and moderate or even liberal members. In a pamphlet distributed to new students in the fall of 1949, for example, the YGOP emphasized its role in the campus’s “progressive” politics; while it declared its commitment to smaller government, it also highlighted its support for eliminating compulsory ROTC and its efforts to fight campus discrimination. Moreover, even in the midst of the fight over the LYL, at least one member of the YGOP, future U.S. secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger, declared in the campus newspaper that “the leaders of the Young Republicans are, in effect, attempting to destroy … liberties in just as insidious a manner as any communist.” The mantle of anticommunism, then, was often taken up by other organizations, including, in 1953, a group called Students for America. The group’s charter called for it to “uncover and eradicate organized subversive elements” on campus, and though it only lasted for a year, it suggested a new direction among conservative students, one that mirrored changes among state Republicans, as the LaFollette family dynasty and its commitment to Progressivism largely ended in the 1940s. Many national Republicans were also moving in this direction, with the party nominating the conservative Barry Goldwater for the 1964 presidential contest after a long struggle between the moderate and conservative wings of the party.⁴³

In another twist, conservative students’ position on the league found some sympathizers on the left as well, though no leftist groups advocated banning LYL from campus. While some on the left avoided communists because of the practical repercussions of associating with them, others were highly critical of the league’s positions, especially its support for the Soviet Union, with the divisions on campus reflecting a long history of infighting on the American left between various factions of socialists and communists. Future historian Gabriel Kolko, then a graduate student and leader of Madison’s Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a socialist and anticommunist group that existed on campus for a few years in the middle 1950s, criticized the LYL in 1955 for its double talk and hypocrisy. In particular, he hit the league’s defense of free speech, citing the lack of democratic protections within the Soviet Union. Another SLID leader, Bertell Ollman, was a persistent critic as well. Like Kolko, he criticized LYL for hypocrisy in their support of civil liberties, and he called out league members in 1955 for what he saw as their efforts to infiltrate other campus groups or, as he put it, to “crawl under the skirts of the campus liberal movements.” He suggested that SLID would like to “sweep them back out under the sun, where their spots can be better observed.”⁴⁴

Despite the many attacks, members of the Labor Youth League, no strangers to adversity, responded loudly. The league had been defending civil liberties since its founding, and in response to the March 1953 call by the campus Young Republicans for a ban on “subversive” groups, league president Alita Letwin argued in the Daily Cardinal for the need to preserve free speech. LYL should be on campus because there are students who believe in its principles and want to belong, she declared, while, more generally, “freedom of thought and action is the most elementary right of students.” Suggesting that efforts to ban the league were akin to imposing a kind of thought conformity, she also sought to highlight the group’s work on issues other than its support for Marxism, pointing to the group’s efforts in fighting campus discrimination and working for lower tuition and higher state funding for university education. Other members of the LYL also spoke out in the pages of the Cardinal, though some of them did not openly reveal their membership in the league. Henry Wortis, who would testify before the U.S. Senate’s Subversive Activities Control Board in 1954 on the status of the league, wrote an opinion piece denying that communists sought a violent overthrow of American democracy, while Marty Sklar, who would continue to play an important role on the campus left into the 1960s, authored a more general defense of academic freedom.⁴⁵

It also helped the league that Senator McCarthy’s lack of popularity on campus seemed to color many students’ view of the recurrent controversies over domestic anticommunism. One of McCarthy’s few campus appearances, in 1951, devolved into chaos when he responded to a hostile audience by calling the students “braying jackasses,” and when the university reevaluated its group and speaker policies in 1953, several organizations raised objections to McCarthyism, including the Baptist Student Center and the Young Democrats. A debate on McCarthyism that July drew an audience of three hundred, most of them anti-McCarthy, while more broadly, there were a number of campus groups committed to fighting McCarthyism throughout the early and middle 1950s, including the short-lived Stick Your Neck Out Club, formed in 1952 by a group of professors and students to assert the right to express opinions without fear of reprisal, and Robin Hood’s Merry Men, an anti-McCarthy group that was established in 1954 to work on a campaign to recall the senator. In 1955, a broad range of campus leaders, including the president of the Wisconsin Student Association, signed and distributed a letter opposing the 1950 McCarran Act, also known as the Internal Security Act, which required communist organizations to register with the federal government and created a board to investigate potential subversion. Questioning the law’s constitutionality and recalling some of former President Truman’s own objections (Congress had overridden Truman’s veto in order to pass the law), the students argued that the legislation threatened young people’s right to freely associate and exchange ideas.⁴⁶

Even within the state legislature, from which Senator Bubolz had threatened to investigate the university, there was a good deal of support for the university’s traditional stance on student groups and outside speakers. Madison may have been one of the more liberal cities in the state, but there were many other parts of Wisconsin that had been deeply influenced by the early twentieth-century Progressive movement, not to mention the continuing strength of socialists in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city. The Wisconsin Legislative Council that requested materials from the university in the wake of Berry’s campus appearance showed little interest in campus radicals, and the group’s report, issued in 1954, took a much more general approach, trumpeting the importance of higher education in the state and echoing the university’s oft-stated concern about the need to educate mature citizens who can make their own evaluation of truth and falsehood. Led by Republican state senator and future governor Warren Knowles, the committee’s report made little specific mention of speakers and student groups at the university, concluding simply that “the university should continue its present policy of placing no restrictions on freedom of speech or assembly beyond those established by state or federal laws.”⁴⁷

That Wisconsin’s state government, dominated by Republicans and working at the height of McCarthy’s national power, would take such a mild approach to the issue of radicalism at the university indicates McCarthy’s complicated position in his home state. McCarthy was certainly popular, winning with 61 percent of the vote when he was first elected as a relative unknown in 1946 and with 54 percent of the vote in his 1952 reelection campaign, after he had gained national prominence for his tough anticommunism, but he actually underperformed other Republicans in the latter election. Among the six Wisconsin Republicans vying for statewide offices that year, his 9-point win represented the smallest margin of victory. Republican Walter Kohler Jr. won the governor’s race that year by 25 points, while Dwight Eisenhower carried the state in the presidential election by a similar margin of 22 points.

This might help explain why McCarthy rarely attacked opponents in his home state. When he did, his attacks were not always well received, such as when he directed his fire at Lawrence University president Nathan Pusey, a McCarthy critic who found wide support even though Lawrence was located in McCarthy’s hometown of Appleton (Pusey would later go on to be the president of Harvard University from 1953 until 1971). McCarthy miscalculated again in 1954 when he denounced Stoughton, Wisconsin, native General Ralph Zwicker, a hero of the Battle of the Bulge, during his investigation of the U.S. Army. The attack on Zwicker was one of several factors behind the “Joe Must Go” recall campaign the same year, a campaign that was ultimately unsuccessful but that gathered between three and four hundred thousand signatures over the course of several months. McCarthy also found it difficult to attack the University of Wisconsin; even though the university was located in the relatively liberal confines of Madison, Republican governors had appointed most of the members of the university’s Board of Regents, and many of the regents were prominent Republicans who were well regarded throughout the state.⁴⁸

By the end of 1953, then, after ten months of deliberation amid the tangle of university and state politics, the university finally released its verdict on the question of student groups and outside speakers. The issue had gone through at least two committees, including the Student Life and Interests Committee, which normally oversaw student groups, and an ad hoc committee formed by President Fred to advise him separately. The latter committee issued a majority report recommending that the university change its policy to deny the use of facilities for outside speakers known to be members of communist or communist front organizations, but Fred ultimately proceeded with the committee’s minority opinion as well as the unanimous recommendations of SLIC. Despite the tumult caused by the appearance of two speakers associated with the newspaper of the Communist Party and the clear political risks near the height of the McCarthy era, the university simply reaffirmed its existing policy of free speech and student political expression. Based on that reaffirmation, it took no action against the Labor Youth League or any other student organizations.⁴⁹

When the results of the policy review were announced, in November, they were couched in the same language of support for critical inquiry on which university officials had drawn for the last half century or more. As Dean of Men Theodore Zillman put it in the cover letter attached to the report, the university’s current policy was educationally sound, consistent with state and federal laws, good for long-term public relations, and avoided the practical difficulty of deciding which groups to censor. At many other universities, of course, the actions of faculty and administrators indicate that they were not so sanguine about the educational or public relations benefits of a policy that allowed communist student groups and speakers onto campus, but the committee drew on the history of the university and the nation in its unqualified support for free inquiry. “Faith in freedom, not fear of freedom, is our heritage,” the committee concluded. “The founders of this republic, though faced with uncertainty and danger, created a free society with full allowance for divergent views. The early leaders of this university, when freedom was challenged, made untrammeled inquiry the guiding spirit for a great university. We propose that the wisdom of this heritage be applied to the problems of today.”⁵⁰

Ultimately, Wisconsin provided an institutional space for dissent that did not exist on many university campuses in the two decades after the end of World War II, let alone places outside of higher education. Certainly, Fred and others disagreed with radical students on the merits of capitalism and American foreign policy, among other things, but they firmly believed that the best way to deal with potentially subversive elements (at least student elements—they were not so certain about communists among the university’s staff) was to let them compete in the marketplace of ideas, a competition that they believed communists and other radicals would surely lose. In response to an Indiana woman who wrote him in 1953, urging him to crack down on campus radicals, Fred responded succinctly: “We agree that our country has much at stake. We differ on ways to combat the menace.” President Harrington would take the same position when he took the university’s reigns in 1962, declaring in a letter to an alumnus that year that “There are many good ways of fighting communism; but these do not include suppressing free speech.” Controversies continued to erupt occasionally over student organizations and especially the radical speakers they sometimes invited to campus, but the 1953 review of university policies stood for the rest of this era. One event that did prompt some outrage from around the state, a Socialist Club-sponsored speech by U.S. Communist Party leader Gus Hall in 1962, shows how little interest there was among Wisconsin’s administrators for another extended policy review. Dean Zillman, writing a memo to Dean of Students LeRoy Luberg, summarized the issue succinctly, suggesting that the administration should simply “let the rascal speak.”⁵¹

It was within this context at the University of Wisconsin that an increasingly energized student politics and the first indications of a new left emerged. American Youth for Democracy and the Labor Youth League were rooted in the Old Left, youth auxiliaries of the Communist Party, but one of the most important developments in Madison was the break from this political tradition that occurred during the 1950s. If the LYL represented an extension of the Old Left, even if the link was somewhat tenuous considering that Wisconsin students operated half a continent away from the Old Left’s center of gravity in New York City, the Socialist Club and Student Peace Center represented both continuity and change. There were many students in the Socialist Club and Peace Center who had been members of the LYL only a year or two earlier, but the continued withering of the Old Left amid McCarthy-era repression, disillusionment over the Soviet Union’s 1956 invasion of Hungary, and the revelation of atrocities committed by Joseph Stalin created an opportunity to rethink basic assumptions for many leftists. The sixties still seemed distant in some ways, but the Socialist Club and Student Peace Center pointed to developments that would become increasingly familiar in the years ahead: students in Madison were less concerned with the internecine fighting that had consumed so much energy within the Old Left, and they incorporated a cultural element in their politics even as they began to utilize direct action.⁵²

The Socialist Club especially symbolized a blending of New York and Madison, a mixing of the Old Left and a new political sensibility, in a way that the transplanted Labor Youth League did not. Particularly important, the Socialist Club was independent from any national organizations, declaring among its founding principles that it would represent “every shade of socialist thought.” Ideological orthodoxy had been prized in the Old Left, but the Socialist Club acted as a kind of meeting place for leftists of various stripes in the late fifties and early sixties, including among its membership some former LYL members along with many others attracted to socialism. In 1963, the club’s summer president, C. Clark Kissinger, declared with pride that “whenever you get ten socialists together, you have at least seventeen different factions”; this ideological diversity would be a hallmark of the New Left, part of the open-ended discussion and debate on how to tackle such deep-rooted issues as imperialism, racism, and income inequality.⁵³

Even more than the Socialist Club, the Peace Center stood out from other leftist groups, significant for cutting something of a new direction in campus politics. This was certainly influenced by the group’s Christian and pacifist origins, but it continued even after the Center’s membership started to look more like that of the Socialist Club in the late fifties. “Everything was done by consensus,” former Peace Center chair Nina Serrano recalls of the group’s early years, anticipating the mood of the New Left as well as, perhaps, the women’s movement. “Feelings counted, not just well-reasoned discourses, like the Marxist study groups. There were no bureaucratic trappings, like offices in New York making the major decisions.” The Anti-Military Balls in particular were more closely related to the countercultural activism of the late 1960s than the more studied and serious programs of other left groups, a development that helped to bridge the divide between leftist students and the rest of the campus. Saul Landau, who had been involved in the Labor Youth League and then the Socialist Club and Student Peace Center (and was married to Serrano at the time), puts the difference between the league and these later groups in simple terms: without the need to adhere to a party line and freed of the discipline of the Communist Party, the campus left in the late 1950s was simply “more fun.”⁵⁴

The Peace Center also helped re-introduce direct action to the campus, though it did so tentatively. No doubt influenced by the national peace movement, which included direct action protests against civil defense programs and other symbols of the Cold War in the 1950s, the Peace Center included a committee on direct action, and in 1957 it reprised the 1950 anti-ROTC protest. In the early 1960s, the SPC became more active, especially on the issues of nuclear testing and civil defense, which were gaining national attention at the time. Holding a number of protests in 1961 and 1962, the group helped lead the way, along with the growing civil rights movement on campus, in developing a direct action politics that would become an important part of the New Left.⁵⁵

These developments in the late 1950s, developments that built on the state’s Progressive tradition and the university’s commitment to civil liberties, point to a crucial moment in the emergence of a new left in Madison and in the United States. They coincided with the waning of McCarthyism from its peak in the early 1950s (though domestic anticommunism would remain a powerful force for many years), and they also suggest a degree of continuity between the 1950s and 1960s that is easily missed given the much more vocal left that emerged in later years. Universities were becoming increasingly important to the nation’s Cold War struggle, but students in Madison and at some of the nation’s other leading universities continued to nurture alternative perspectives on the Cold War. These students had little idea that a powerful new left would exist within a few short years, but their efforts laid an important foundation for the great changes in American culture and society that would take place during the sixties.