Activist Impulses

No sooner had the student movement emerged than speculation began about the sources of campus activism. Since such large scale student protest was unprecedented in the nation’s history, it was natural that a variety of theories would evolve as Depression America sought to explain this new phenomenon. An assortment of conservatives—which included superpatriots, redbaiting editors, and politicians— wrote the most and screamed the loudest about the causes of student radicalism during the 1930s; they did so because of their outrage at the growth of Left-led organizations and student anti-war demonstrations on campus. Their most frequent explanation for this unwelcome upsurge of student activism centered on the faculty, whom they blamed for corrupting and radicalizing youth. The conservative press depicted college faculty as dangerously subversive. Professors emerged in these pages as a sort of academic branch of the Red Army. “There are few colleges or universities where parents may send their sons and daughters without their being contaminated with some phase of the vilest of Communistic and allied teaching,” warned Roscoe J.C. Dorsey, in the The National Republic, a superpatriot magazine which crusaded against faculty and student radicalism. In this same journal E.D. Clark, president of the Indiana State Medical Association, diagnosed “Red Microbes in Our Colleges,” evoking fears of political and sexual radicalism. The Hoosier doctor claimed that “under the guise of ‘academic freedom’ many professors . . . are not only teaching communism, socialism, anarchy . . . but are also endorsing ‘free love’ and unrestricted sex relations between unmarried people.” This rightwing indictment of the faculty was not confined, however, to the college level. Conservatives hurled similar charges against teachers in secondary and even elementary schools. The Hearst press, which did so much to give such charges national circulation, claimed in 1935 that thanks to the work of subversives in the nation’s school systems “two hundred thousand Soviet schoolbooks have been imported into America.” According to these rightwing critics, youths’ support for radicalism in college derived from exposure to subversion by teachers at all levels of the American educational system.

From Popular Front to Unpopular Sect

Students in the 1939—1940 academic year had more reason than ever to worry that they might soon be carrying rifles instead of textbooks. With the start of classes in September came news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, followed by the British and French declarations of war against Germany. Before the first month of classes had ended, the Nazi conquest of Poland was complete. The great European war, which American student activists had spent much of the decade trying to prevent, was at hand. There followed several tense months without hostilities, Europe’s “phony war.” But any hopes that this was more than a temporary lull were shattered during the spring semester when Hitler struck again, launching Blitzkriegs which defeated Denmark and Norway in April and the Low Countries in May. The most shocking blow of all came at graduation time, when American students learned that France had fallen to a Nazi invasion. Although this news from Europe was horrible, it should have strengthened the student movement in the United States. After all, the movement’s most influential organizations—the ASU and Youth Congress—had spent years warning Americans of the threat that Nazi Germany posed to world peace. Hitler’s aggression had borne out those warnings. America seemed on the verge of adopting the anti-fascist position long advocated by the student movement. Even Congress began to move away from strict neutrality and rigid isolationism by repealing the arms embargo so as to aid Great Britain. All of this could have enhanced the student movement’s prestige, conferring upon its activists a prophetic cast. Hitler’s march through Europe should also have boosted the American student movement because it gave students an added impetus for turning out at rallies, lectures, and other movement events to protest Nazi aggression. At a time of surging student anxiety about a potential United States entry into the war, the student movement might have expanded greatly by continuing to carry its hopeful message that America could stay out of war by supplying Hitler’s foes in Europe. But instead of growing in this new crisis atmosphere, the American student movement began to crumble.

Beyond the New Deal? Egalitarian Dreams and Communist Schemes

The student movement came to President Roosevelt’s doorstep on February 20, 1937, when some 3000 young demonstrators marched on the White House. The protesters, representing student and youth organizations from across the nation, sought to dramatize the economic hardships of youth in Depression America. Marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, they waved banners and chanted their demands. “Pass the American Youth Act—We want jobs;” “Scholarships not Battleships;” “Homes not barracks.” One group dressed in prison garb, carried a sign “We never had jobs.” Others costumed as pilgrims, miners, and farmers made the same point. The California delegation rode in oil a covered wagon bearing the battered sign “Go East Young Man.” To the tune of Yankee Doodle, the protesters—carrying signs that identified their college, school, religious group, or trade union affiliation— sarig “American youth is on the march for jobs and education.” This was, as the Washington Post observed “a line of marchers such as Washington has never seen before.” This march on the White House was part of a three day Youth Pilgrimage for Jobs and Education. The protesters did more than parade down Pennsylvania Avenue; they also lobbied Congress on behalf of greater federal assistance to the millions of young Americans hurt by the Great Depression. The pilgrimage attested that even though peace was the most popular cause on campus, the student movement of the 1930s was not merely an anti-war crusade. It was also a movement for social justice, whose leaders cared so much about the plight of low-income youth that they chose to make this, rather than war, the focus of the movement’s first sizable national march on Washington. The pilgrimage symbolized the student movement leadership’s commitment to building a more egalitarian America. The movement’s leaders envisioned a society where education would be a right rather than a privilege; they thought Washington should ensure that no one would be—as millions of Depression era youth had already been—forced to drop out of school because of insufficient funds. The student movement sought to make America a nation free of unemployment, poverty, and racism.

The Making of a Mass Movement

Franklin Delano Roosevelt so dominated the American political scene from the fall of 1932 through the end of the Depression decade that historians refer to these years as the Age of Roosevelt. He won the 1932 presidential race in one of the greatest landslides in American history, trouncing Hoover—who the electorate blamed for the Depression—by almost seven million votes. FDR then presided over the extensive New Deal recovery, relief and reform programs, whose popularity helped keep him in the White House longer than any other president. But Roosevelt’s great popularity with the general public did not initially carry over onto college campuses. During most of his first term, neither FDR nor his major programs captured the imagination of the American student body. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932 failed to generate much excitement on campus, and from 1933 to 1935 the cause that most inspired college youth was world peace rather than the New Deal. If the choice had been left to college students, the straw polls show, Franklin Roosevelt would not have been elected president in 1932. FDR ran far behind Hoover in the campus polls taken shortly before election day. Only 31 percent of the collegians polled supported Roosevelt, while 49 percent endorsed Hoover. Roosevelt even did badly on campuses where he had direct, personal connections. At Harvard, FDR’s alma mater, the Democratic candidate lost to Hoover by a margin of more than three to one: 1211 students there voted for Hoover, while only 395 cast their ballots for Roosevelt. Support for Roosevelt was also weak among undergraduates at Columbia University, despite the fact that several of his key advisers, popularly known as the New Deal “brain trust,” including Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolph Berle, were Columbia professors. With almost two thirds of Columbia undergraduates voting, FDR attracted only 221 votes, losing not only to Hoover, who drew 307 votes, but also to Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate, who won 421 votes. This enabled Columbia socialists to boast at the Norman Thomas rally at Madison Square Garden that “Columbia Professors May Write Roosevelt’s Speeches But Columbia Students Vote For Thomas.”

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.

Cafeteria Commies

Leadership in the collegiate transition from political apathy to activism came from the Left and initially it came with a New York accent. Almost all of Depression America’s early eruptions of student protest—including the student expedition to Harlan County, the Columbia free speech strike, and the City Colleges’ anti-tuition movement during the 1932 spring semester—either occurred on or were launched from campuses in New York City. Though consisting of only a small minority of the student body in New York, the city’s campus radicals were the best organized, most politically ambitious and militant student activists in the nation. New York’s emergence as the center of the student revolt of the early 1930s was largely the work of the National Student League (NSL), the New York-based radical organization responsible for orchestrating the first political protests by collegians during the Depression decade. The birth of the NSL in December 1931 marked the organizational beginning of student activism in the Depression era. Coming at a time when nationally militant political protest did not yet exist on campus, the NSL’s founding in New York attested that the city’s student activists were ahead of their time and of the rest of American undergraduates on the road to mass protest. The role that New York’s campuses played in igniting the student movement was facilitated by the city’s unique political climate. New York was the capital city of American radicalism during the Depression decade. Here the Communist Party, which during this decade became America’s largest radical organization, had its national headquarters and strongest following. The city was also a stronghold for the Socialist Party, which had considerable influence in metropolitan area labor unions. The radical intelligentsia too made New York its home and used the city as a base for publishing the nation’s most important leftist magazines and journals. Evoking the intense radicalism and heated ideological debate in New York during the Depression, Lionel Abel recalled that intellectually the city’s leftists “went to Russia and spent most of the decade there . . . . New York became the most interesting part of the Soviet Union . . .

The Popular Front on Campus

The international threat posed by fascism became the central concern of the student movement during the second half of the Depression decade. For this generation of college students not a year passed without some ominous reminder of the rising strength, belligerence, arid brutality of European fascism. There was Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s military support of the Spanish fascist revolt in 1936 and 1937, Germany’s anti-Jewish pogrom and conquest of Austria in 1938, and the Nazi invasion of Czechoslavakia and Poland in 1939. These events, along with Japan’s escalating war on China, prodded many student activists to rethink the isolationist assumptions their anti-war movement had popularized on campus in the early 1930s. The increasing aggression of the fascist powers led these activists to worry that the very neutrality that their movement had urged upon the United States to promote peace, instead, bred war by preventing America from orchestrating an international effort to thwart fascist expansionism. This mindset facilitated the rise of a major challenge to isolationism within the student movement, which by 1938 pushed the movement’s largest organizations to abandon their isolationist policies and embrace collective security. The first influential group within the student movement’s leadership which sought to shift the movement away from isolationism was the communists. These radicals had the earliest and clearest vision of the student movement’s need for a more explicitly anti-fascist foreign policy. Their thinking on this matter had been strongly influenced by deliberations of the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (CI) in August 1935. The CI became concerned about the triumph of Nazism in Germany, its spreading influence in Europe, and the potential threat these developments posed to the U.S.S.R.’s security. The Seventh World Congress therefore urged the formation of broad national coalitions and international collective security arrangements on behalf of a Popular Front against fascism. For communists in the American student movement, this implied the need to turn the movement’s foreign policy away from American neutrality and toward the endorsement of collective efforts among the United States, the Soviet Union, and other anti-fascist states to prevent military aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Springtime of Revolt

The spring of 1932 marked the dawn of a new age in American student politics. Shaken by the Depression, collegians began to discard their traditional political apathy. Even college debating teams were affected, choosing as their leading topic that spring “social planning of industry,” and arguing over whether the “Stuart Chase plan,” the “Charles Beard plan,” or the Socialist plan offered the best way out of the economic crisis. And college students were doing more than talking about politics; they were starting to become involved in political actions, signaling a major change on campus. Where for the past decade political activism had been a rarity among college youth, beginning in 1932 such activism became increasingly common. The campuses were entering an era of protest: from the spring of 1932 until the end of the Depression decade not a semester would pass without some significant expression of political protest by American undergraduates. The shift toward activism became evident during a series of political protests led by the NSL in the spring semester of 1932. These initial political actions involved only a minority of students, most of whom were from just one region of the country—the Northeast. But these protests were the start of something big; they gave life to a dissident tradition, which by the mid-1930s would yield the first mass student protest movement in American history. The student political actions of the spring of 1932 did not focus upon a single issue. Instead, there were a diversity of concerns, ranging from the exploitation of workers off campus to free speech and economic problems on campus. Though the issues around which students mobilized were diverse, all of this activism was characterized by a common spirit: a desire to prove that undergraduates cared about the problems of Depression America and were organizing to address those problems. This was a conscious revolt against the apolitical collegiate lifestyle inherited from the 1920s, which because of the Depression had begun to seem anachronistic; it was an attempt to replace that lifestyle with a more adult-like and political undergraduate tradition that would be more appropriate to a generation and a society troubled by hard times.

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

Herbert Hoover’s America was a dismal place in 1931. The president had failed to end or even mitigate the economic crisis, which began with the stock market crash of 1929. Unemployment had spiraled out of control; the number of jobless Americans had soared from 429,000 in 1929 to more than nine million in 1931. The Hoover White House had undermined its credibility in 1929 and 1930 by erroneously predicting economic recovery. But by late summer 1931 even some of the president’s closest congressional allies were glumly admitting that the end of the Depression was not in sight. Breadlines and shantytowns—dubbed “Hoovervilles” to mock the impotent president—had spread across the nation, grim testimony to the hunger and homelessness wrought by the Great Depression. Municipalities and private charities could not keep pace with the need of millions of unemployed Americans for economic assistance. Relief workers, local officials, and liberals on Capitol Hill in August 1931 called for a special session of Congress to legislate aid for the unemployed; they warned that without federal relief dollars, the coming winter would bring widespread starvation. That same month, as their elders in Washington fretted over how to ready themselves for another year of Depression, students at the University of California at Berkeley also began to prepare for the coming year. But for Berkeley students that preparation did not include discussions of hunger, poverty, or other Depression-related problems. As the fall 1931 semester began, fraternities arid football, sororities and parties, were the talk of the campus. In its opening editorial of the semester, the Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper, gave advice to new students, making it sound as if their most serious problems would be chosing the proper Greek house and deciding whether to participate “in sports, in dramatics or publications.” The editor also informed the freshmen that they were “fortunate to have a classmate in [football] coach Bill Ingram . . . [who will] bring back another ‘Golden Era’ for California athletics.”