In the new Journal of Legal Education, Sara Ludington has a very interesting article, The Dogs that Did Not Bark: Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Silence of the Legal Academy During World War II. It’s a provocative article, and worth a read. Thanks to Alfred Brophy for the link.
JPG says:
Excellent article. This part should be especially interesting for Eugene Volokh and other 1A specialists.
February 2, 2011, 2:41 pmGiant Frog says:
Linda Gottfredson has several papers about current academic freedom/silence.
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/
February 2, 2011, 2:46 pmSearch on the page for “academ”[e/ic] (one paper doesn’t have ‘freedom’ in the title) to find this subject among the many great papers there.
lgm says:
I was troubled by this line from the abstract:
As a left leaning professor myself, I immediately suspected that the article would be in indictment of such. This phrase makes me more suspicious. But my understanding is that academia was not a hotbed of tenured radicals before or during WWII.
February 2, 2011, 3:16 pmHouston Lawyer says:
Where are those professors who are trying to rein in the power of government? I’d say that far more of them are cheerleaders for the regulatory state.
February 2, 2011, 3:57 pmSarcastro says:
Have you read this Volokh blog? It’s lousy with government watchdog types!
February 2, 2011, 4:04 pmwm13 says:
“my understanding is that academia was not a hotbed of tenured radicals before or during WWII.”
Back then, academia was a nest of copperheads. It has switched to tenured radicals. But the common theme is evident.
February 2, 2011, 4:07 pm1040 says:
I for one am glad that left wingers were not anti American as they have been in the current war. Sara Ludington must surely be an anti American Nazi cuddler given that she seems to view their silence as a bad thing. Can we call her the “SS One” given her cheerleading of opposition to the government during a time of war?
February 2, 2011, 4:09 pmwfjag says:
Her position appears to be essentially revisionist. WWII involved existential threats to the US. That’s far different from today in which overwhelmingly Academia involves people who are safe to sit behind their computers and criticize, while others take the risks that guarantee their safety. In WWII, not only did professors go into government jobs, many served in the military, OSS and similar positions that put them on “the pointy end of the stick.” Further, many, if not most, had experienced (or at least seen) the privations caused by the Great Depression. Additionally, many of these were members of or sympathetic to the US Progressive Movement, which was responsible for such great (and greatly failed) social experiments as Eugenics and Prohibition. These are very different perspectives from someone whose main battle has been publish or perish in a left tilted political setting. IMO, Prof. Ludington fails to appreciate the very different social milieu and beliefs of those times.
Also, contrary to lgm’s assertion that “my understanding is that academia was not a hotbed of tenured radicals before or during WWII”, prior to the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War, there was nothing wrong in Academia with being openly a Communist. I think he would find Bird & Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, quite instructive. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother was certainly a Communist, and while JRO probably wasn’t one, he never felt constrained to avoid persons he likely knew were Communists. And, as the Communist Party was the only group that consistently and openly opposed the Nazis and Fascists (at least until Hitler and Stalin made their treaty) and many in power in western Europe and the US at least openly flirted with the Nazis, the attraction to the CP is understandable.
From that perspective, much of the silence of Academics concerning US (and UK) conduct during WWII is understandable. The USSR was clearly fighting for its life against an enemy which had no reservations about exterminating Slavs (and many other “races”). Accordingly, anyone sympathetic to the USSR would be pressed to criticize the largest source of outside material support to it (the US) or the nation whose Navy bore the brunt of ensuring that the Arctic supply line was not severed (the UK). Moreover, it wasn’t until well after WWII that the destruction of whole population groups and slaughter of real and imagined political opponents in the USSR under Stalin became widely known. So, left-leaning Academics can be forgiven if, until such was documented, they seemed to believe that the USSR wasn’t all that bad, even if it didn’t always reach the levels of equality that the Communist Manifesto proclaimed socialism would achieve. It isn’t McCarthyism to conclude that the CP and CP sympathizers were well represented among American Academics in the 1930’s and through the end of WWII (as well as in other important aspects of American life – e.g., V.P. Henry Wallace has repeatedly been alleged, with considerable factual basis, to have been at least a “fellow traveler”). IMO, in her critique of “left leaning academics” Ms. Ludington seems to go out of her way to avoid looking too closely at the ideological leanings of such academics, to avoid being accused of McCarthyism. This is a different type of revisionism, but, revisionism all the same, since it avoids understanding the context of the times.
Contrary to her contentions, perhaps they were correct not to speak out. The US’s conduct was not perfect. However, they may also have considered a very real alternative to be much worse, and muted their criticisms accordingly.
February 2, 2011, 5:29 pmFederale says:
Maybe they were patriotic and unencumbered by the moral relativism of “diversity?”
February 2, 2011, 5:45 pmJohn Burgess says:
Law professors as “watchdogs of government”? Really? You mean they fought a turf war with journalists and lost?
Never, ever, have I considered law professors to be “watchdogs of government”. Tweakers, gadflies, ivory towerites, and those interested in the history of law and its applications, yes.
February 2, 2011, 5:48 pmBel says:
left-leaning academics generally supported the war. Not really, until june the 22 th 1941, they were against the war. That was the order
February 2, 2011, 6:14 pmTatil says:
Along with the majority in the US.
February 2, 2011, 6:26 pmSarcastro says:
all taking orders from Stalin, no doubt.
February 2, 2011, 6:37 pmTatil says:
Did you forget the sarcasm tags? :) I mean we all know opposing the government is unAmerican, but still…
February 2, 2011, 6:41 pmHarryEagar says:
A spectacular misreading of events. Left-leaning academics were pro-war when the war was in Spain. They were not behindhand in the committee to support democracy by supporting Britain, either.
As a snippy cub reporter, 45 years ago, I had the opportunity to ask Clark Kerr, who had circulated the peace pledge petition at Oxbridge in the early ’30s, whether he had changed his outlook by 1938.
His reply: “Of course.”
February 2, 2011, 6:55 pmStruthius says:
Sarcastro: Be careful. You’re getting predictable and boring.
February 2, 2011, 7:56 pmPeter says:
“WWII involved existential threats to the US.”
You know wfjab I have yet to see a convincing argument for this though I will admit the average US citizen may have actually believed it at the time. It is the same scaremongering you hear with each new Wikileaks release yet each time some months later the US will casually admit with no fanfare “minimal to no impact from that earlier release”. As far as I can tell even had Japan (or Germany) won (which undoubtedly have been a forced settlement as opposed to occupation) the US would have continued to exist just fine. Sure the world might have looked different today (then again maybe the Soviets would have rolled both by the early 50′s and the world would look the same) but I’m pretty confident the USA with all 48 of its states (at the time) would have remained intact with a republican government.
February 2, 2011, 7:58 pmHarryEagar says:
You must be new here. Those half-trillion$ in US bonds would have been at a steep discount. That’s existential threat at VC.
Everything must be done to protect the bondholders, don’t you know?
February 2, 2011, 8:42 pmzuch says:
He’s just a mere reflection of the political milieu he comments on. No justification in blaming him for what is reflected….
Cheers,
February 3, 2011, 12:25 amTGGP says:
Fortunately, it is now agreed that being a public employee does not mean giving up your first amendment rights, provided of course you are a lawyer rather than a doctor.
I second the notion that the U.S was not existentially threatened. Even Hawaii was not a state and had the Pacific Fleet recently moved there from San Diego precisely as a demonstration to Japan (whose real concern was China).
February 3, 2011, 12:44 amFormer Army MP says:
The left in America, which was most of the academy and media, were against the Germans in Spain. New orders came in from the Soviet Union–we are friends now with the Germans, oppose the war. They bowed and followed orders.
Then new orders, we hate the Germans, war on. And the war was on and stayed on. At the end, the academic classes even cheered at the orders of their Soviet masters as a Supreme Court Justice took leave to execute German leaders in a sham proceeding.
Then there is the issue of the atomic scientists. It was “full speed ahead, nuke the Germans”, but when it looked like the bombs were headed for an even more evil enemy–but one that hadn’t directly affected their people– then they got all anti-bomb. Total, absolute, happenstance that at the same time they were transferring the tech to their Soviet masters.
February 3, 2011, 8:24 amSarcastro says:
Atomic scientists were all Commies too?! Between Hollywood, the left and academia, there’s a pinko behind every tree!! I mean, the fact that some members of each group were bribed by Russia is enough evidence that they are all anti-American!
If only we had more better political purges, life would be different.
February 3, 2011, 8:43 amlgm says:
This sounds like an over the top parody, but in case it isn’t…
Many American physicists thought that the Germans would be able to build an atomic bomb and win the war with it. Once the Germans were out of the picture, the bomb was an unnecessary evil that the world would have been better off without. Nobody thought the Japanese capable of building the bomb.
February 3, 2011, 10:26 amLou Gots says:
The Japanese were quite capable of causing the deaths of several hundred thousand Americans and tens of millions of their own people unless we caved into the demands of the criminal Hirohito regime and granted them their terms. It is common knowledge that those fiends were preparing to send in woman and children with artillery shells strapped to their bodies to escape justice for themselves.
February 3, 2011, 10:46 amSarcastro says:
And thus anyone who disagrees with dropping those two bombs cannot be sincere, but a Commie taking orders from their Soviet masters!
February 3, 2011, 11:09 amJPG says:
This is a common historical misconception. It is clear that the war was to come to an end within a relatively short time, and that Truman and his advisors were fully aware of this. The Soviets had started being involved in a total war against Japan in East Asia just before the two A bombs were dropped. This meant that Japanese couldn’t anymore expect peace talks to go through Moscow’s mediation, Hirohito knew he had no other option than unconditional surrender.
It is not at all clear whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck in order to end the war with Japan in the shortest possible time or to make sure the SCAP (under US leadership) would have the higher hand – rather than the Soviets – to secure peace and make sure Japan wouldn’t fall under the Red Army’s sphere of influence.
February 3, 2011, 11:37 amkatahdin says:
The just completed Okinawa campaign lasted 82 days, and involved a much smaller island and population than the home islands. Estimates of the civilian casualties range from 1/10 to 1/3 of the total preinvasion population.
Applying the same fraction to the Japanese population as a whole would mean from 7 to 23 million civilian casualties. Casualties from Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled less than 200000.
One can argue how close the Japanese were to surrender. Even after Hirohito decided to surrender, military hardliners tried to stage a coup to prevent a surrender.
One can what-if about Hiroshima and Nagasaki ad infinitum, but to say that ‘it is clear’ the atomic bombs didn’t shorten the war and save many lives doesn’t square with the historical record. Perhaps Japan would have surrendered. Perhaps not. But they did surrender within days. Given the ongoing casualties from conventional raids, moving the surrender up by even a couple of weeks would result in many lives saved.
February 3, 2011, 12:22 pmHarryEagar says:
Including something like the entire population of Korea, since the Japanese were expropriating the whole rice crop. The famine in the peninsula would have been epic — a tragedy, indeed, since it would have deprived Ilya Somin of one of his favorite whipping boys.
The idea that the American left was yo-yoing on war with Germany to match Soviet policy is a rightwing fantasy. The CPUSA was, but the broader American left (typified by Hemingway) was not.
It was the American right that was consistently against war with Hitler.
February 3, 2011, 1:04 pmkatahdin says:
Prior to Pearl Harbor, I presume? My impression was that the country was pretty well united after Pearl Harbor.
My impression prior to that was that there was a pretty broad based isolationist sentiment – mostly a ‘we just finished the ‘war to end all wars’ 20 years ago, and we can’t get dragged into those seemingly constant European wars’ kind of thing. There were certainly admirers of Fascism – Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and so on. My impression was that those opinions weren’t widely held, even on the conservative side of the political spectrum. Do I have that wrong?
February 3, 2011, 1:15 pmJoe Hooker says:
You can get a good idea of how the Left felt by following the career of singer Pete Seeger. He supported the Republicans in Spain as part of the anti-fascist Popular Front, then suddenly became a pacifist after Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler. After the German invasion of Russia in June ’41 he just as suddenly became a hawk and began denouncing isolationism, pulling an anti-war album he’d just released and writing “The Good Ship Reuben James.” No, the Left wasn’t going to do anything to undercut support for the war or especially for the Soviet Union — they were too busy demanding “second front now!”
February 3, 2011, 1:55 pmSarcastro says:
Eh, I prefer to judge the left by Alger Hiss myself.
February 3, 2011, 2:41 pmHarryEagar says:
Not entirely but partly. America First (Lindbergh was its poster boy) was antisemitic, pro-Hitler and antiwar and popular enough to fill Madison Square Garden and frighten antifascist politicians.
The conservative Protestant churches, especially the Lutherans, were skeptical that Hitler was a bad guy and fed the antiwar movement.
It was not possible, then, to predict how a person felt about making war against fascism by his politics, though.
My father, a New Dealer, entered the service before the war, expecting to fight fascism, but as he said decades later, the choices were not so easy to make in those days as people were able to pretend they had been after the victory had been won.
The idea that the country united following Pearl Harbor is partly mythical. The Republicans in Congress showed a marked distaste for doing much of anything against Germany. They would much rather have fought Russia. This attitude survived until May 1945, and if you like I can direct you to conservatives who still feel we fought the wrong war.
Fellow-traveling fascists (of whom there were plenty) had an easy out: They could demand Japan-first, as there was hardly any pro-Japan sentiment anywhere.
Dalton Trumbo’s introduction to the Vietnam-era reprint of ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ is instructive about who really was for what in those days, no matter what they later would have everyone believe. (Just because Trumbo was a Stalinist doesn’t mean he wasn’t a witness of American fascism. I recall he said he used to letters about it from ‘swanky tidewater addresses.’)
I do not think the 1940 American attitude to Germany can be understood without reading Owen Wister’s 1915 ‘Pentecost of Calamity.’
February 3, 2011, 3:39 pmwfjag says:
The very sad state of the American Army is described in detail in Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn. The Army suffered high casualties in those locations of Operation Torch that the French put up any resistence. As the French North African troops were not well equipped, and, weren’t exactly spoiling for a fight against the Americans, as that helped the Germans, that’s an indication of how unprepared the U.S. was.
My father-in-law was a member of a state National Guard and called onto active duty in the Army in 1940. He was issued a broomstick as his “rifle.” Since he grew up in the rural South, marksmenship wasn’t a problem for him. Still, as Atkinson recounts, a lot of city boys died because they didn’t know how to shoot or clean their weapons. Early in the war, there wasn’t enough ammunition for adequate training.
Further, the equipment a US Soldier or Marine had in 1940 was nearly the same as that a Doughboy had in 1918. By 1945, only the socks and Dog Tags remained the same. Looking backwards, it is easy to forget that the organizational, manpower, manufacturing, training, supply, etc., effort of changing the 1930s Army of around 170,000 to the 1945 one of over 5 Million, was unparalleled — except possibly by the USSR, which was a dictatorship in which no dissent or opposition to Stalin was tolerated. From the perspective of 1939 or 1940 looking forward, it likely would have seemed impossible. However, by 1945, the US had supplied the largest share of the jeeps, trucks, tanks, airplanes, ships, bullets, boots, blankets, belts, socks, crackers and condoms (and everything else needed by Armies and Navies of Allied nations).
Further, in May 1940, when France fell, Churchill was extremely worried that the French fleet would be turned over to the Axis, or join them. The combined French, German and Italian Navies would have been 50% larger than the entire Royal Navy (and, the UK still had to worry about protecting Asia). To reduce the threat, he ordered the Royal Navy to attack the French fleet in their North African ports when they refused to sail to Britain and surrender (or join a Free French Government in Exile). Had the French fleet stayed in French Mediterranean ports instead of moving to Oran and other North African ports, the Italian Navy could have aided it against the British attack, and the two fleets possibly defeated the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Further, Hitler planned to reinstall on the British Throne, Edward VIII, who was a Nazi sympathizer (as was his wife), and who was fairly popular with the British people. A less forceful and canny leader than Churchill probably could not have held the British people together. So, there are a lot of “what ifs” that early in WWII that could have changed its outcome drasticly.
Still, I don’t think that there would have been German troops in jack-boots Goose-Stepping down Broadway (outside of a Mel Brooks film). However, had the US suffered catastrophic losses at the outset, and if there had been an alliance of Germany, Italy, the UK, France and Japan against the USSR, I doubt there would have been much stomach in the US for a war that pitted it against most of the industralized world.
Still, in the 1930s there were plenty of people who questioned whether democracy remained a viable form of government — and they weren’t all Nazis or CP members. According to Prof. T. Harry Williams’ book Huey P. Long, Long was no Nazi sympathizer. Still, he clearly believed in “Every Man a King” and “Me, First!” Although he died in 1936 due to medical incompetence in treating the wound he received when he was shot, he wasn’t the only populist rabble-rouser (before or since). And, because of fear of attack on the US, the establishment of a dictatorship in the US to protect it after FDR’s “failure” to do so was not impossible.(“Fear” in quotes because I’m well aware of how ham-strung he was by isolationist and anti-war sentiments — but, people tend to forget their past attitudes when a new threat emerges, and blame leaders who didn’t go againt their wishes). So, I believe that you identify the most serious existential threat to the US at that time — a threat from within, if the war had gone very badly against the US early on.
February 3, 2011, 6:35 pmHarry Eagar says:
Even the Civil War wasn’t an existential threat, but it was fought anyway.
‘Democracy in one country’ might have been as hard a trick to pull off as ‘socialism in one country.’
February 4, 2011, 3:38 amFormer Army MP says:
Please recall that FDR was forced to fire his vice president after he, and his academic buddies and the NYT, were covering up the Soviet death camps during the war.
American officers were coming home from Lend/Lease duty and spreading the truth, and sooner or later one of the right leaning papers would have reported what was really going on using American supplies.
Add in the Morgenthau plan, also supported fully by the academic class (and, of course, our movie making and finance classes for other reasons), and FDR was fairly lucky he died when he did.
We came very close to not only fully supporting one set of death camps, in Russia, but running our own giant one in Germany, all under his presidency.
February 4, 2011, 9:41 amJPG says:
katahdin, you should note that this is neither what I wrote, nor what I meant. I actually believe dropping the bombs gave no chance to Japanese militarists other than to surrender to the allied forces. It gave the US an upper hand in peace talk negociations. I pointed out it is now known by historiographs that the main consideration for Truman et al. was not to save the nation from casualties and costs of war as much as it was to make sure the Red Army wouldn’t liberate much of Japanese possessions in eastern Asia.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings gave the US enough diplomatic weight to secure their position in Japan and in most of eastern Asia, at least until 1949.
February 4, 2011, 1:08 pmFormer Army MP says:
Any time someone in academic circles says “It is well known”, what they really mean is “You had better agree with me”–and they say it because they know they are stretching the facts.
February 4, 2011, 2:15 pmKatahdin says:
Can you recommend a source? Most of the memoirs I have read disagree, so I’d like to understand the argument more.
February 4, 2011, 4:28 pmFormer Army MP says:
Thanks for the back-up, K-dog, but I suspect we will either get a single cite and nonsense, or a quick ‘racist’.
February 4, 2011, 7:42 pmHarry Eagar says:
See Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, ‘Racing the Enemy,’ for the most broadly sourced study.
He demonstrates that it is a myth that Japan was about to surrender anyway. He concludes that it was the invasion of Manchuria, not the bombs, that shocked the IJA into surrender.
His own documents show this not to have been the case.It was both.
The dust jacket of ‘Racing the Enemy’ depicts Truman and Stalin, presumably the ‘enemies,’ although the text never does say who the enemies were.
At any event, it can be shown that the military was rushing to drop the bomb at the earliest possible time (Rhodes has the document in ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb.’)
I have no idea where former MP got his fantasy about starving Germans. The Germans finished the war better fed than their victims and were given more calories than their victims by the occupation authorities. William Shirer was incensed. See ‘End of a Berlin Diary.’
I also would like to see his documentation that Lend-Lease officers had access to Soviet labor camps. I’ve never seen any evidence they did. Their constant complaint was that they couldn’t travel. The camps were a long way from the delivery ports.
February 4, 2011, 8:38 pmFormer Army MP says:
It has been a long time since I encountered a Morgenthau plan denier.
Not wanting to get into a long argument chain in a dying thread, anyone who is interested in doing some self research…
Search terms:
JCS 1067
Treasury “special agents”
General Clay and President Hoover
Short books:
February 5, 2011, 9:20 amMorgenthau’s own book, Germany is our Problem
Dietrich’s book, The Morgenthau Plan
Harry Eagar says:
Since the Morgenthau plan was to make Germans farmers (oddly resonant with Himmler’s desires), to argue that it would have led to starvation in Germany is perverse.
As we know, the the Soviet-occupied territories after the war, nutrition in the cities was inadequate but the peasants were well-fed.
Morgenthau wanted the Germans to be poor and weak, but to equate that with Soviet-induced agricultural collapses is in a line with other rightwing fantasies.
February 5, 2011, 2:37 pm