Harvard Stood Up to Trump. Too Bad the School Wasn’t Always So Brave.
But Lowell’s more lasting legacy was to lead the Lowell Commission, a three-person group appointed by Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller to advise him on whether to spare the lives of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who’d been convicted for murder on extremely flimsy evidence in a trial rampant with judicial misconduct. Sacco and Vanzetti were almost certainly innocent, but the commission, which Lowell dominated, recommended that the execution go ahead. The columnist Heywood Broun (Harvard ’10; no degree) later commented, “What more can these immigrants from Italy expect? It is not every prisoner who has a president of Harvard University throw on the switch for him.” Broun recommended that “the institution of learning in Cambridge, which once we called Harvard, be known as Hangman’s House.”
Red Scare Two. Another split decision. On the one hand, Harvard Magazine editor John Rosenberg told me (reading over the phone from former Harvard Magazine editor John T. Bethel’s 1998 book, Harvard Observed), Harvard President Nathan Pusey was judged by Senator Joe McCarthy to be a reprehensible “anti-anti-communist.” When McCarthy came after a Harvard associate professor of physics named Wendell Furry, Pusey refused to fire him, which showed courage. Instead, Pusey called a press conference in Massachusetts Hall and said that no member of the Communist Party was fit to be a member of Harvard’s faculty, but he was not aware that any were.
The Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah (Harvard 1950) said in a 2005 letter to The New York Review of Books that Harvard’s reputation for saying the wrong thing while doing the right thing was, in his experience, charitable. In the fall of 1954, Bellah wrote, while he was a graduate student in sociology and Far Eastern languages, he was called into the office of McGeorge Bundy, then dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. Bundy told him he’d learned Bellah had been a member of the Communist Party and that Bellah would be obliged to name names to the FBI. Bellah replied that he’d be glad to discuss his own activity (he was indeed a member from 1947 to 1949) but that he wouldn’t identify others. That’s what Bellah did when the FBI picked him up off the street a few days later.
