RICHARD SCHLATTER
615
openness of mind and a willingness to explore all alternatives sympa–
thetically: my assumptions, I assume, are not necessarily the assump–
tions of my students-nor should they be.
I remember Heywood Broun's story of how he became a radical. As
an undergraduate at Harvard he took a course in the spring term given
by the ultraconservative sociologist, Thomas Nixon Carver. The first
half of the course was a presentation of radical social theories , and the
second half was devoted to Carver's refutations of these theories. But
the baseball season in Boston opened just as the refutations were
beginning, Broun went to the games instead of the lectures, missed the
refutations, and was a radical for the rest of his life. I have always taken
this
to
be a tribute to the pedagogical honesty of Thomas Nixon
Carver.
Both my monograph on the
Social Ideas of Religious Leaders,
1660-1685
(Oxford, 1940) and my book on
Private Property
(London
and New Brunswick, N.J., 1951) show very clearly, both in the subjects
chosen for study and in the way those subjects are analyzed, how much
my own beliefs about the nature of man and society have guided my
scholarship and how much those beliefs have been influenced by
Marxist historical theory. Reviewers have noted this influence. I was
flattered when Eugene Genovese referred to me as one of the best of
American Marxist historians. But no reviewer has called my writings
propaganda or has accused them of lacking rigor and impartiality. In
fact, those reviewers who found merit in my books thought the method
of interpretation the most interesting aspect, and that would not have
been what it was except for my experience as a young Communist.
In the end, then, being a Communist and a radical was important
and, I believe, fruitful for me as a teacher. The Harvard Communists I
knew never lost some sense of critical detachment. In Cambridge we
had, I suppose, some degree of nonchalance-it used to be called
Harvard indifference-and none of the deadly seriousness of some
Communists, a seriousness, it may be, taken from the Russians, for
whom politics has always been a matter of life and death. Communism
at Harvard seems to have been very different from communism at City
College. So I find it difficult
to
comprehend what Dan Boorstin meant
when he said to the House Un-American Activities Committee, "I
think a member of the Communist Party should not be employed by a
University." Speaking for myself, if Harvard should not have let me
teach in 1938, then Rutgers should not let me teach now. My pedagogi–
cal style and my assumptions about the reasons for doing history have
not changed much since I left the Communist Party.
