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Richard Schlatter
ON BEING A COMMUNIST AT HARVARD
In the faculty lunch room at Rutgers University recently, I
was asked by a young colleague how it was that I could have been a
Stalinist at Harvard. I was startled by the question : no one had ever
ca ll ed me a Stalinist before nor had I ever thought of myself as one. or
did I ever know of any Trotskyists or Trotskyites or Burnhamites or
Lovestoneites at Harvard. Harvard was very remote from New York
City. At Harvard in the thirties I had simply been a member of the
Communist Party. But that began, not at Harvard, but at Oxford.
I came to Harvard in 1930, the only child of sensible, lower-middle
class, Republican , small-town, upwardly-mobile parents. In school I
caught a glimpse of the world of ideas, books, the arts and high culture.
I was the bes t student in my high school, and college seemed the road
to
freedom.
I was already something of a grass roots radical. I had taken
Presbyterian Sunday School seriously, read the New Testament fer–
vently and became, vaguely, a Christian socialist. Then I lost my
Christian faith but remained a kind of socialist. I was encouraged by a
high school teacher who was a socialist and a pacifist. I read G.B.
Shaw,
Th e Int elligent Woman's Guide to Socialism,
and I subscribed
to the
New R epublic.
I believed, in a loose sort of way, in progress, in
equality-racial, economic, social, political-and I thought wars had
come
to
an end.
But I forgot most of this when I arrived at Harvard in 1930. I was
overwhelmed and wholly delighted with the intensel y intell ectual ,
luxurious, ivory tower world of Cambridge. Luxury: I had a bedroom,
bath, and sitting room with fireplace and maid service in a grand
House with library, common rooms, squash courts, and handsome
dining room where excellent meals were served by uniformed wait–
resses three times a day. I had a full scholarship. I had only a vague
impress ion that outside there was something called the Great Depres–
sion. My family were lucky enough to survive without any real
hardship-they must have worried a lot but they never told me-and I
had no personal experience whatsoever of poverty.
