By Glenn Altschuler & Isaac Kramnick

Cornell in the Cold War (Part I)

This is the first of two articles derived from ongoing study of Cornell history from 1945 to the present by Glenn Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick. Altschuler, PhD '76, is the Litwin Professor of American Studies, dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions, and vice president for university relations. Kramnick is the Schwartz Professor of Government. They are the co-authors, along with Laurence Moore, the Newman Professor of American Studies and History, of The 100 Most Notable Cornellians. In their research, Altschuler and Kramnick have had access to many presidential papers in the Cornell archives, some of which had never before been open to scholars. The full manuscript, with footnotes and additional material, is available online at cornellalumnimagazine.com.

Cornell Goes Bolshevist" proclaimed the New York World-Telegram on October 19, 1943.

The University's Russian courses, the paper announced, were being taught by communists, making Cornell a breeding ground for "Muscovites." For the next several days, the paper repeated its accusation in articles and editorials carried in other Scripps Howard and Hearst papers across the country.

The attack was focused on two Russian émigrés, Joshua Kunitz and Vladimir Kazakevich, who had been hired to teach in the Intensive Russian Language and Culture Program, which the University agreed to design for the United States Army in the summers of 1943 and 1944. The Army had chosen Cornell because since 1939 it had offered an innovative Slavic language and studies program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. For twelve weeks, hundreds of trainees in what was called the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) were brought to Ithaca and immersed in conversational Russian language. The students also took courses in Cornell's Institute of Contemporary Russian Civilization.

Cornell's president, Edmund Ezra Day, had been delighted that the Army asked his university to play an important role in the war effort. "Because of Cornell's well-known reputation as a pioneering institution," he wrote after the Soviet Union had become an ally of the United States, "strong representations were made that it take a lead in the development of modern Russian studies." Answering this call was what Day had in mind when he insisted in his 1937 presidential inaugural address that universities had a "social obligation" to "add to the common weal." Not that the Dartmouth- and Harvard-educated former economics professor—who before coming to Cornell had taught at Harvard and Michigan and been director for the social sciences with the Rockefeller Foundation—didn't see problems in such activities. "We knew," he later noted, "that we were taking a calculated risk in agreeing to run the Army program," given the lack of "authentic and validated information" about Soviet Russia and "an even worse lack of critically trained teachers." And, of course, given the potentially controversial nature of the instruction.

President Edmund Ezra Day

Several weeks before the first World-Telegram attack appeared, Day asked Cornelius deKiewiet—a professor of history and director of the Army program that sponsored language and culture courses in German, Italian, Czech, and Chinese, as well as Russian—to inform the Cornell faculty about the initiative. Controversial material would be taught in these courses, he conceded, but this was the intention of the Army authorities responsible for the program. If instructors had "burning convictions" about their subjects, they should lay out their views and "provide the opportunity for free discussion." DeKiewiet was as concerned with courses about our enemies, Germany and Italy, as he was about Russia, a "friendly and associated power." In a surprisingly capacious vision of academic free inquiry, he wrote:

There is no objection whatever to handling controversial material if the purpose is to improve the understanding or promote the efficiency of Army trainees. Marxism and communism, the genuine achievements of Hitler or Mussolini, attractive characteristics of enemy peoples—these can and should be freely handled. The ASTP wishes its  trainees to have a mature and sympathetic comprehension of other areas and peoples.

President Day responded to the World-Telegram's charge that students were being indoctrinated by "communist" faculty in a January 7, 1944, letter to Cornell's Board of Trustees:

For reasons which are relatively easy to understand, the only available instructors who have an intrinsic knowledge of contemporary Russian conditions are individuals who had been repeatedly in Russia during the period since the revolution. Perforce, most, if not all of those individuals have exhibited "Russian sympathies"; otherwise they would not have had opportunities for close observation of developments under the present Soviet regime.

Day then reviewed the careers of Kunitz and Kazakevich, their study in America, and their travels in and writings about Soviet Russia. "As far as we can see," he concluded, "there is nothing in [the] entire record that suggests 'un-American activities.' " Having talked with the Russians, Day was prepared to vouch for their loyalty and their "thorough" commitment "to the American way of life."

Having reassured the trustees, Day turned next to calming any fears in the general public about "Red Cornell." In March 1944 he stated the University's position in the prestigious Saturday Review. Written in an age before professional speech writers, "So Cornell's Going Bolshevist! The Strange Case of the Russian Courses," is a beautifully crafted, at times deeply moving, essay, interwoven with a history of Cornell and an almost lyrical paean to freedom of inquiry.

It was an "unpleasant experience," he began, with wry understatement and a touch of intellectual disdain, to find the "good name" of his institution "aspersed in the columns of a metropolitan daily." Day felt particularly sad for anxious alumni, fearing that their alma mater "is pulled down from the serene heights on which their adolescent imaginations had placed her." He then addressed head-on what he referred to, in terms not yet part of common American political parlance, as the World-Telegram's "witch-hunting." It wasn't the first time his institution had been so publicly attacked, he pointed out, recalling the accusation in the nineteenth century of "Godless Cornell." Having its "faith tested" could be salutary, he proclaimed, if it forced Cornellians to realize that "a principal obligation of any university is a certain fearlessness about the knowledge which it professes and the end which it pursues."

Little could President Day know in 1944 that Cornell's encounter with a metropolitan daily was a mere minor prelude to the full-blown drama of postwar anti-communist hysteria— the phenomenon we now know as McCarthyism—that would engulf the University for the next twenty years, requiring Day and his successor, Deane Waldo Malott, to walk a fine line, balancing their commitments to academic values with demands of loyalty and Americanism. In meeting these challenges, Cornell's presidents, administrators, and faculty would sometimes falter and stumble as the weight of the political world outside East Hill fell upon their shoulders. For the most part, however, in the face of pressure from trustees, politicians, and the popular press, they bent but did not break.