Andrew Feffer. Review of Stephen H. Norwood's The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
[Andrew Feffer is Associate Professor of History and co-director of Film Studies at Union College. He teaches American cultural and intellectual history].
Since the 1950s, American academics have fostered the view that fascism, to the extent that it has appeared at all in the United States, has rarely been found above the lower reaches of our political culture. Social scientists generally trace extreme right-wing movements to one part or another of the populist tradition and the status anxieties of uprooted middle classes. The rest, the few Catholic elites indulging Francoist sympathies or the occasional Ivy-league graduate hawking right-wing conspiracy theories, are exceptions.
Stephen H. Norwood would like to disabuse us of such exceptionalist notions. As he doggedly traces the contribution of American academics to the rise of international fascism, he reminds us that many of the nation’s best and brightest had a dalliance with the dark side as it spread across Europe in the 1930s. Much of this story is already known in its parts, but the ubiquity of such sympathies becomes starkly apparent in this relentless chronicle of academic complicity.
Norwood’s main focus is on college and university presidents and deans, and he outlines three ways in which they aided and abetted the rise of fascism: They remained silent; they did things that enhanced the prestige of Germany and Italy; and they allowed and even occasionally participated in explicitly fascist activism on their campuses.
The first of these, a sin of omission on which Norwood spends (some might say wastes) a great deal of time, is the most difficult to measure. It is hard enough to hold political leaders accountable for what they do not do; harder still for college administrators. Modern American colleges and universities observed unwritten rules against explicitly taking sides in political disputes, though boards of trustees and presidents had no problem making exceptions to those rules when they felt like it or were pressured to do so. Yet in retrospect it is still rather surprising that until Kristallnacht in November 1938 the administrations of almost all of the country’s major academic institutions remained silent while a good part of the nation (including many college and public school students) engaged in an “outpouring of protest” against the rise of fascism in Europe. No major college president convened or participated in any of the many anti-fascist protest meetings and none urged students to attend them. Like Harvard’s James Conant, American college presidents overwhelmingly “failed to speak out against Nazism on many occasions when it really mattered.”
As Norwood points out, moreover, the official academic silence on the matter of fascism must be viewed in the context of other more active sins. Many college and university presidents emphatically discouraged anti-fascist activism on their campuses, as MIT’s Karl Compton did in 1933 when he blocked efforts of students and faculty to send a telegram to Hitler protesting repressive measures. Many administrators made gestures that either neutralized criticism of the Hitler regime or tacitly endorsed it; using the many subtle powers at their disposal, and thus “helped Nazi Germany present itself to the American public as a civilized nation, unfairly maligned in the press.”
In the worst cases, American universities honored Nazis at convocations and other academic occasions, sometimes even celebrating their contributions as Nazis, as Harvard’s Conant did by hosting prominent Nazi ideologue Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl in 1934 in defiance of widespread public protest. Conant and other American college presidents also sent delegates to the University of Heidelberg’s 550th anniversary celebration in 1936, despite the fact that German universities had by that time fired Jewish professors, thrown out Jewish students and quite visibly burned the books of Jewish, “cosmopolitan,” anti-Nazi and “decadent” authors. British and Dutch universities in contrast refused to participate.
Similarly, several New England colleges joined Harvard in enthusiastically feting the sailors and passengers of the German warship Karlsruhe on its clearly propagandistic “goodwill” mission to the United States in 1934. Dartmouth’s German Club, according to Norwood, “helped transform the friendly reception the city of Boston and Harvard University provided for the Karlsruhe into a New England-wide event,” bringing along women from sister clubs at Smith, Bennington, Wellesley, Radcliffe, and Middlebury. Forty members of Dartmouth’s faculty joined in.
Norwood also reminds us of several cases in which universities and colleges allowed what for lack of a better term one must call fascist “subversion.” At Rutgers University, notorious in the 1930s for anti-Semitism, students testified to open classroom proselytizing for Hitler by members of the German department, which in 1935 ran its one avowed anti-fascist, a young instructor named Lienhard Bergel, off the faculty with administrative approval. Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler maintained strong ties to the Mussolini regime, which he admired, into the late 1930s through the school’s Casa Italiana, a center for the study of Italian culture and the home of the Italian department. Like many Italian programs around the country, Columbia’s not only promoted student exchanges with Italian universities but also disseminated fascist propaganda.
Many institutions maintained term abroad programs in Germany and Italy, even as the Nazi and fascist governments used the programs and their young participants for proselytizing. At Vassar, a junior returned from a year in Munich in 1935 to praise Hitler for righting the German economy, declaring in the school’s newspaper that the “New Germany is building – building new houses and new dams – everyone is motivated by a feeling of progress.” Nazi sterilization programs were necessary, she asserted, for “eliminating people with inheritable diseases.”
As one might expect, much of this drift toward the dark side was driven by home-grown anti-Semitism. Butler, who considered Columbia “a Christian institution,” set a quota on Jewish enrollment, a precedent followed by other universities through the 1930s. One of Butler’s deans, Thomas Alexander, openly voiced approval of Nazi sterilization policy; another, Barnard’s Virginia Gildersleeve, notoriously espoused a radical anti-Semitism through the late 1940s. Conant’s seemingly casual anti-Semitism and his sympathies with the Nazis became especially consequential after the war, when as U.S. high commissioner and ambassador to post-war Germany he lent his considerable influence to secure the early release of Nazi war criminals, an act for which he was publicly attacked by William Clark, the chief justice of the Allied Appeals Court in Nuremberg from 1948 to 1953.
Yet, for all the contemptible moral lapses that Norwood shows us blighting the American university, the argument in this book could be stronger. Some of his examples appear to reflect merely the doltish equanimity of academic life or misapplied principles of academic freedom. Even more troubling is Norwood’s broad definition of “complicity,” which includes “silence” and indifference along with spoken and active support for Nazis and fascists. Moral failure and hypocrisy are not complicity. We can’t assume that academics who say nothing about a reprehensible regime in another country necessarily support it, even if we would rather they more consistently stood by the liberal values that supposedly guide institutions of higher education. One wishes for this reason that Norwood spent less time cataloguing the sins of omission by admittedly anti-Semitic and authoritarian college presidents like Conant and Butler and more time exploring the activity of fascist organizations on campus, a piece of this history that is woefully understudied. And while Norwood devotes a chapter to the influence of Francoism and Italian fascism on administrators and faculty at Catholic Universities, he gives almost no coverage to the presence of Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front in the late 1930s.
Those objections notwithstanding, Norwood shows there was indeed complicity on the part of American universities and college administrators in the international fascist movement during the 1930s. As this carefully crafted study begins to reconstruct that story, it contributes to a more complete picture of indigenous American fascism, and it is worth consulting for that reason alone. But much more needs to be done.
Since the 1950s, American academics have fostered the view that fascism, to the extent that it has appeared at all in the United States, has rarely been found above the lower reaches of our political culture. Social scientists generally trace extreme right-wing movements to one part or another of the populist tradition and the status anxieties of uprooted middle classes. The rest, the few Catholic elites indulging Francoist sympathies or the occasional Ivy-league graduate hawking right-wing conspiracy theories, are exceptions.
Stephen H. Norwood would like to disabuse us of such exceptionalist notions. As he doggedly traces the contribution of American academics to the rise of international fascism, he reminds us that many of the nation’s best and brightest had a dalliance with the dark side as it spread across Europe in the 1930s. Much of this story is already known in its parts, but the ubiquity of such sympathies becomes starkly apparent in this relentless chronicle of academic complicity.
Norwood’s main focus is on college and university presidents and deans, and he outlines three ways in which they aided and abetted the rise of fascism: They remained silent; they did things that enhanced the prestige of Germany and Italy; and they allowed and even occasionally participated in explicitly fascist activism on their campuses.
The first of these, a sin of omission on which Norwood spends (some might say wastes) a great deal of time, is the most difficult to measure. It is hard enough to hold political leaders accountable for what they do not do; harder still for college administrators. Modern American colleges and universities observed unwritten rules against explicitly taking sides in political disputes, though boards of trustees and presidents had no problem making exceptions to those rules when they felt like it or were pressured to do so. Yet in retrospect it is still rather surprising that until Kristallnacht in November 1938 the administrations of almost all of the country’s major academic institutions remained silent while a good part of the nation (including many college and public school students) engaged in an “outpouring of protest” against the rise of fascism in Europe. No major college president convened or participated in any of the many anti-fascist protest meetings and none urged students to attend them. Like Harvard’s James Conant, American college presidents overwhelmingly “failed to speak out against Nazism on many occasions when it really mattered.”
As Norwood points out, moreover, the official academic silence on the matter of fascism must be viewed in the context of other more active sins. Many college and university presidents emphatically discouraged anti-fascist activism on their campuses, as MIT’s Karl Compton did in 1933 when he blocked efforts of students and faculty to send a telegram to Hitler protesting repressive measures. Many administrators made gestures that either neutralized criticism of the Hitler regime or tacitly endorsed it; using the many subtle powers at their disposal, and thus “helped Nazi Germany present itself to the American public as a civilized nation, unfairly maligned in the press.”
In the worst cases, American universities honored Nazis at convocations and other academic occasions, sometimes even celebrating their contributions as Nazis, as Harvard’s Conant did by hosting prominent Nazi ideologue Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl in 1934 in defiance of widespread public protest. Conant and other American college presidents also sent delegates to the University of Heidelberg’s 550th anniversary celebration in 1936, despite the fact that German universities had by that time fired Jewish professors, thrown out Jewish students and quite visibly burned the books of Jewish, “cosmopolitan,” anti-Nazi and “decadent” authors. British and Dutch universities in contrast refused to participate.
Similarly, several New England colleges joined Harvard in enthusiastically feting the sailors and passengers of the German warship Karlsruhe on its clearly propagandistic “goodwill” mission to the United States in 1934. Dartmouth’s German Club, according to Norwood, “helped transform the friendly reception the city of Boston and Harvard University provided for the Karlsruhe into a New England-wide event,” bringing along women from sister clubs at Smith, Bennington, Wellesley, Radcliffe, and Middlebury. Forty members of Dartmouth’s faculty joined in.
Norwood also reminds us of several cases in which universities and colleges allowed what for lack of a better term one must call fascist “subversion.” At Rutgers University, notorious in the 1930s for anti-Semitism, students testified to open classroom proselytizing for Hitler by members of the German department, which in 1935 ran its one avowed anti-fascist, a young instructor named Lienhard Bergel, off the faculty with administrative approval. Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler maintained strong ties to the Mussolini regime, which he admired, into the late 1930s through the school’s Casa Italiana, a center for the study of Italian culture and the home of the Italian department. Like many Italian programs around the country, Columbia’s not only promoted student exchanges with Italian universities but also disseminated fascist propaganda.
Many institutions maintained term abroad programs in Germany and Italy, even as the Nazi and fascist governments used the programs and their young participants for proselytizing. At Vassar, a junior returned from a year in Munich in 1935 to praise Hitler for righting the German economy, declaring in the school’s newspaper that the “New Germany is building – building new houses and new dams – everyone is motivated by a feeling of progress.” Nazi sterilization programs were necessary, she asserted, for “eliminating people with inheritable diseases.”
As one might expect, much of this drift toward the dark side was driven by home-grown anti-Semitism. Butler, who considered Columbia “a Christian institution,” set a quota on Jewish enrollment, a precedent followed by other universities through the 1930s. One of Butler’s deans, Thomas Alexander, openly voiced approval of Nazi sterilization policy; another, Barnard’s Virginia Gildersleeve, notoriously espoused a radical anti-Semitism through the late 1940s. Conant’s seemingly casual anti-Semitism and his sympathies with the Nazis became especially consequential after the war, when as U.S. high commissioner and ambassador to post-war Germany he lent his considerable influence to secure the early release of Nazi war criminals, an act for which he was publicly attacked by William Clark, the chief justice of the Allied Appeals Court in Nuremberg from 1948 to 1953.
Yet, for all the contemptible moral lapses that Norwood shows us blighting the American university, the argument in this book could be stronger. Some of his examples appear to reflect merely the doltish equanimity of academic life or misapplied principles of academic freedom. Even more troubling is Norwood’s broad definition of “complicity,” which includes “silence” and indifference along with spoken and active support for Nazis and fascists. Moral failure and hypocrisy are not complicity. We can’t assume that academics who say nothing about a reprehensible regime in another country necessarily support it, even if we would rather they more consistently stood by the liberal values that supposedly guide institutions of higher education. One wishes for this reason that Norwood spent less time cataloguing the sins of omission by admittedly anti-Semitic and authoritarian college presidents like Conant and Butler and more time exploring the activity of fascist organizations on campus, a piece of this history that is woefully understudied. And while Norwood devotes a chapter to the influence of Francoism and Italian fascism on administrators and faculty at Catholic Universities, he gives almost no coverage to the presence of Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front in the late 1930s.
Those objections notwithstanding, Norwood shows there was indeed complicity on the part of American universities and college administrators in the international fascist movement during the 1930s. As this carefully crafted study begins to reconstruct that story, it contributes to a more complete picture of indigenous American fascism, and it is worth consulting for that reason alone. But much more needs to be done.
Fascist sympathizers in high places
I'd be interested in his take on this book.