Heroic prof during McCarthy terror

Ever hear of James E. Schevill? Probably not. But he was a hero while McCarthyism was ravaging America.
Schevill, a courageous professor when many people trembled with cowardice, died recently in Berkeley at 88. He was a poet, critic and playwright.
But his greatest glory was refusing to sign a loyalty oath as a prerequisite for teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
He wrote a letter in 1950 to university president Robert Sproul declaring that he had searched his conscience for several days. The result: he could not sign.
“To me loyalty is not a matter of signature but of heart and action,” he wrote.
He assailed the Red Scare haunting America. He noted that the envelope bearing his loyalty oath carried the number 78025.
“Men are turning into numbers all over the world,” he noted. Schevill refused to be a number.
He pointed out that his father had taught at Berkeley for many years, years during which his father “helped to build the university into the world reputation for free thought that it has enjoyed.”
Now, he lamented, many of his father’s friends had been fired “as if their years of service meant nothing.” He added: “I cannot bring myself to betray the devotion with which my father served a free university.”
He concluded with a ringing plea for academic freedom: “In this suffused atmosphere of questioned loyalties, which reminds me more and more every day of the half-comic, half-tragic world of Kafka’s novels, I cannot agree to the debasement of the free exchange of ideas.”
After rejecting the McCarthyite oath, Schevill taught at the California College of Arts and then at San Francisco State. From 1968 to 1985 he taught creative writing at Brown University.
The loss to Berkeley students was great. But the greater tragedy was nationwide. As Edward R. Murrow said in his 1954 telecast exposing McCarthy:
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices. If none of us ever read a book that was ‘dangerous,’ had a friend who was ‘different’ or joined an organization that advocated ‘change,’ we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.”
Communist witch hunts hit California particularly hard. The California state committee ot un-American Activities persuaded the University of California to adopt its infamous loyality oath. Thirty-one Berkeley professors were fired for refusing to sign even though they were not communists.
Across the nation more than 100 professors were fired. Even the American Association of University Professors, which loudly proclaimed the importance of academic freedom, did not condemn the outrage.
McCarthy’s ugly tentacles reached into Hollywood. Two hundred actors and screen writers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs in the movie industry. Red-baiters circulated Red Channels, a publication that denied jobs in radio and TV to anyone with the remotest radical connections.
The soft-on-communisn smear resonated throughout the country after Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran pushed the McCarran Act through Congress in 1950. The measure required the Communist Party to register and disclose the names of its members.
President Truman rightly vetoed the McCarran bill as a violation of the First Amendment. But many so-called liberals joined conservatives to overide the veto.
However, it was Truman himself who started the despicable red-baiting three years before Senator McCarthy sounded a bogus warning that there were 205 communists and spies in the State Department.
Truman required federal employees to sign loyalty oaths in 1947. This heinous measure soon spread to state and local government--and even to private employers.
Columnist Dennis Myers noted that Reno’s Cal-Neva forced 105 employees to sign or resign. Myers added sardonically: the “atomic spy candidates” included dealers, pit bosses, waiters and janitors.
Frank McCulloch, the best journalist ever to come out of Nevada, as editor of the weekly Nevada State News in Reno, denounced such absurdities. But such absurdities plagued the University of Nevada during the Reign of Intellectual Terror.
Al Higginbotham, head of the UNR journalism department, signed a loyality oath swearing he was “not a member of the Communist Party.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the staunchest defender of free speech in the land, got weak-kneed during the McCarthy era. It endorsed a bill to limit picketing at federal courthouses to prevent “communists from intimidating the courts,” as Christopher Finan put it in his book, “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act.”
Worst of all, the ACLU refused to support Paul Robeson, great singer, actor and leftist, when the State Department revoked his passport. His crime? He refused to sign an affidavit denying that he was a communist.
McCarthyism was a terrible blot on the American escutcheon.