Spies, Suppression, and Free Speech on Campus

As the student movement spread across America from 1933 to 1935, it encountered strong opposition from college and university administrators. The anti-war demonstrations and strikes, the mass endorsement of the Oxford Pledge, and the rising influence of leftist-led student organizations outraged many of these administrators. This activism seemed so radical and sudden a departure from the political quiescnce of the collegiate past that campus officials often found it intolerable. The initial impulse of many college deans and presidents was to try suppressing this student activism, in a manner quite similar to that previously seen on New York’s campuses during the early days of the NSL. But just as repression had failed to kill New York’s student movement in 1931 — 1932, it would also fail to stop the rapid growth of the movement nationally in the mid-1930s. This was due in large part to the determined free speech fights waged by student activists, who made campus political rights a top priority for their movement. Free speech became a “cause célèbre” on campus because, as former NSL leader Celeste Strack recalled, students found administration acts of suppression politically offensive and personally insulting: . . . While the war and peace issue was becoming big, academic freedom was already a hot issue because no matter what you wanted to talk about you were up against the effort . . . [of] the administration not to give you the right to talk like grown up people about issues. . . . They . . . [would] treat us like children, and that was very deeply resented, [and] . . . this was a very important question. . . . The disrespect of college administrators for student political rights ran deeper, however, than even most movement activists could have guessed; it led these campus officials to infringe upon student civil liberties not only publicly but also covertly. College and university administrators opposed to the student movement became involved in secretly feeding information on student protesters to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), enabling the Bureau to open dossiers on many of these Depression era campus activists.