Looking Back: Mid-Century Columbia

Research for my senior thesis led me to three states and through countless folios, but no matter how far I wandered and how much I tried, I could never get away from Columbia. The University was an intellectual, political, and cultural force in mid-century America. Liberals and conservatives alike recognized this fact. Today, however, it too often goes unsaid. Few can truly appreciate Columbia’s role in defining the post-war world.

For the late Senator Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), one of the greatest Americans to grace the Senate chamber, Columbia was a decidedly political place. In preparation for the 1952 Republican primary, the Ohioan compiled documents critical of fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower from the far left and right. A California-based anti-Communist organization led the charge, attacking Columbia University President Eisenhower for his “peculiar pro-Soviet bias” when he allowed Columbia to accept a “$30,000.00 subsidy from the communist government of Poland.” The report went on to cite Dr. Arthur P. Coleman, a Columbia professor of 20 years and expert in Slavic studies, who “resigned from the faculty in protest.” As Coleman argued publicly, “Since only the naïve can believe that the present Polish regime controlled by Moscow would not help the U.S.S.R. with all its resources to overthrow by force the government of the United States I should regard my connivance in the work of academic infiltration at my University as a violation of my affidavit.”

The anti-Eisenhower jeremiad ends with an invocation of a now defunct Hearst paper, The Los Angeles Examiner, which read:

“Following the publication of the various protests, President Eisenhower made his decision. He accepted the Coleman resignation and he defended the Kridl appointment—the effect of his action being to put an anti-Communist out of the Columbia faculty and to let a Marxist in.”

“These occurrences,” The Examiner continued, “indicate that a policy is being pursued at Columbia University which is fair to describe as PRO-COMMUNIST.” (Original emphasis)

It’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction and propaganda from truth, but there is no denying that Columbia’s internal politics were visible and controversial things. They were contentious and politicized times not much different than our own, and Robert Taft knew that well. Taft’s hard-fought ’52 campaign ended nowhere else but Columbia University’s Morningside Heights.

In the months before the Republican National Convention, Taft sat down with General Eisenhower for a historic two-hour summit. “The Morningside Heights Agreement” secured Taft’s participation in a national pro-Eisenhower presidential campaign. Publicly, Eisenhower promised to “maintain the unity of the entire party by taking counsel with all factions and points of view.” Privately, Taft questioned what influence—if any—he would have on the new Administration. Eisenhower would return the favor nearly a year later when he endorsed Taft for Senate Majority Leader. Believe it or not, Columbia was once a hub of national Republican politics.

Columbia made great contributions to the national debate intellectually, as well. In 1950 the inimitable Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination:

“In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

The late William F. Buckley Jr. was ready—as always—with a quick retort. A youthful Buckley published God & Man at Yale in 1951, a scathing conservative critique of his Yale education. He followed this initial success with the National Review, a weekly journal of conservative opinion. In his November 19th, 1955 Publisher’s Statement the elder statesman of conservatism shot back at Trilling:

“The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination.”

Buckley and his prose will be missed. But what of Columbia? What can the contemporary community expropriate from this divisive past?

For one thing, our history is far from idyllic. We are not so removed from the conflicts and controversies of Columbia at her institutional zenith that we cannot relate to them. Rather, the opposite holds true. While we cannot idealize our past, we can look to it for direction.

Something worked fifty years ago. Something clicked. And while there are countless causal mechanisms and unexplained variables to account for it, there was, for certain, one thing lost in the ’68 riots: civility. Whether it was Taft and Eisenhower or Buckley and Trilling, Columbians debated their differences peaceably. It is a powerful and telling statement, but one need only look to our institutional past to confirm it.

Chris Kulawik is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and political science. Chris Shrugged runs alternate Wednesdays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com