610
PARTISAN REVIEW
In
1937 I came back to Harvard as a Tutor in History and
Literature. Harvard had been politicized in the three years since I had
left. The Harvard Teachers' Union had attracted some of the best
people on the Faculty: Paul Sweezy, F.O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller,
Harry Levin, David Owen among many others. I took an active part.
Radicalism in the thirties was bound up with the union movement,
and I was for a time a delegate from the Teachers' Union to the Boston
Council of the A.F.L. The Union invited Harry Bridges for a trium–
phal visit to Harvard. Students also had a strong political union, and
some of the leaders were among my tutees.
But I saw no communists anywhere and did not make any effort to
find any. The Spanish War was drawing to a close, the Popular Front
did not amourH to much in America.
In
England I had wanted to see
the British and the French intervene to stop the fascists, but in America
I had always been an isolationist. My generation was convinced that
America had made a terrible mistake in entering World War I, and I
was wary of becoming entangled again. And interventionism hardly
seemed practical politics in 1937.
The first communist I met at Harvard was Granville Hicks. He
had been invited to come as a temporary lecturer on American culture.
President Conant had made funds for a lectureship available, and
Murdock, Matthiessen, Howard Mumford Jones, Perry Miller and a
few others had selected Hicks as the most eminent American Marxist
and communist intellectual. Hicks was assigned to Adams House,
where I was a resident tutor. One day at lunch I mentioned to him my
political activities at Oxford, and he told me he had formed a small
Harvard Faculty communist group and asked me to come around. I
and some of the people who had been at Oxford with me went along.
Altogether we were a dozen or so-the names were front-page news
some years later when the House Un-American Activities Committee
was conducting its historical researches into subversion at Oxford and
Harvard.
Again, in 1938-39 my major interests were not political. I was first
of all a young academic learning to lecture, conducting tutorials,
writing a book and some scholarly articles. The Harvard communist
group talked a lot. Some of it was good talk. I remember one meeting
when a hack party functionary came to lecture us on Lenin, whose
works, he said, contained accurate predictions of future events. "So
does the Book of Revelation" said Robert Gorham Davis, and that
ended lectures by party functionaries.
The Harvard communist group did discuss the business of the
