Libeling Our Colleges

by LOUIS M. LYONS

1

PRESIDENT TRUMAN had his heartiest election laugh in public holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune’s first edition on the morning of November 3 with the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

This performance of the paper that entitles itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper” seems to have been unique. The Boston Globe in its earliest, edition was able to state “Election in Doubt.” The New York Times corresponding edition had “Truman Is Running Strong in the East.” The New York Herald Tribune’s early headline was “DeweyTruman Race Close in Early Returns,” The Washington Post said “Truman Takes Slight Early Lead.” The Harvard Crimson with only its pony AP wire managed “Truman Is Ahead.” All of these stated only the news that, realty was news at the time of printing. “Dewey Defeats Truman” was not a fact at any time.

This upside-down journalism rang a bell with many whose experience of the Chicago Tribune “news” had led them to agree with the Washington correspondents corps in rating the Tribune the “least reliable newspaper” in America. It must also have rung a bell with some of the leading Eastern universities.

On October 16 a Bulletin from Dartmouth College alerted two thousand of its alumni officers to expect a series of attacks on the college in the Tribune. Sure enough, the next week saw a daily run of smear stories in the “news” columns of Colonel McCormick’s paper done by Eugene Griffin, the same Tribune reporter who last spring had described the Ivy League colleges as “infested with the pedagogic termites of communism.”

The Tribune headlines ran “New Dualism Forced on Dartmouth “Seniors Forced to Listen to Propaganda”; “Dickey a Drum Beater for Utopia”; “Carnegie Pays for Dartmouth Smear Course”; “Most of Profs at Dartmouth New Deafish.” (As to how New Deafish the Dartmouth faculty is, the actual Presidential vote in Hanover, where Dartmouth families predominate, was Dewey 1304, Truman 378, Wallace 40.) The Tribune’s opening piece stated that; “under the leadership of Pres John Sloan Dickey, who came here last year directly from a State Department propaganda job, Dartmouth has become fhe eastern seaboard’s newest seat of higher indoctrination in the New Deal cult of America-Last internationalism.”

The occasion of the attack was Dartmouth’s new Groat. Issues course, which the Tribune described as placing Dartmouth “alongside Harvard in the front, rank of New Deafish srhools.” (As to how New Deafish Harvard is, the best evidence G the pre-election poll of the faculty conducted by the Harvard Crimson, which showed the professors 4 to 1 for Dewey. Only 20 Wallace supporters showed up among the 480 professors polled.)

“The Great Issues Course at Dartmouth,” the Tribune reported, “has received rave notices in the pro-British sections of the New York press and other schools have sent scouts to Hanover to copy it.” (The “pro-British” New York papers, to one uninitiated in Tribune vocabulary, are the Time, and the Herald. Tribune.)

It was when the Chicago Tribune got hold of the Dartmouth Bulletin describing the methods and manners of its reporter that the heat was really turned on in the “news” columns. The reporter who had just printed thirteen columns of smearing and slurring of Dartmouth’s president and faculty, now lugubriously complained of a “last ditch smear job.”

Perhaps the Tribune has reason to be disturbed at Dartmouth’s Great Issues course, for through it a generation of students are learning to read newspapers so as to recognize slants and distortions,

John Sloan Dickey came to Dartmouth’s presidency in 1945. Though only thirty-eight, he had behind him a solid career in the law and distinguished experience in public service. His first year out of Harvard Law School he was assistant to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Correction. Then followed two years as assistant to the legal adviser of the United States Department of State. He returned to Boston law practice for four years with the firm of Gaston, Snow, Hunt, Rice & Boyd. In 1940, at the age of thirty-three, he became special assistant to the Secretary of State and continued in strategic war assignments until 1945. These included duties as special assistant to the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, chief of the division of World Trade Intelligence, director of the Office of Public Affairs, and public liaison officer of the United States delegation at the San Francisco Conference, where the United Nations was born.

His public service convinced him of the urgent need that college graduates be informed on the issues of their times, and be trained to inform themselves. Last year he instituted the Great Issues course, required of all seniors. He broughl before the class in weekly forums leaders in American life and thought, among them Reinhold Niebuhr, Beardsley Kami, Dean Acheson, Nelson Rockefeller, Chesler Barnard, Sumner Slichter, and Charles P. Taft, to discuss some of the great issues that face this generation of Americans.

For such a course newspapers constitute one of the chief texts. The college has been at pains to expose the seniors to newspaper reading and to direct their attention to the major news events. Through a carefully organized “Public Affairs Laboratory" it has helped the seniors to examine the news and to see how public affairs are presented by different kinds of newspapers. Major news stories are marked daily in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune, Students are directed to note how the same events are treated in other papers ranging from the extremes of the Chicago Tribune to the Daily Worker. Each senior is required to make a special study of the treatment of one of the major issues as it has been presented in half a dozen papers,

A noteworthy exhibit in the college library last fall was on “Quality in Newspapers.” The exhibit included among other illustrations clippings from the Chicago Tribune. The conclusion as to the Tribune: —

The Chicago Tribune plays up FDR (anathema)

Marshall Plan (any details capable of discrediting it)

British Socialism (“failure of”)

Government projects (“folly of”)

United Nations (“silliness” and “danger of”)

The Chicago Tribune plays down news favorable to the EBP.

Any newspaperman knows that this is an understatement.

It was dearly this exhibit that brought the Chicago Tribune to produce possibly the most ludicrous complaint ever made in print. “In the Public Affairs Laboratory,” the Tribune reported, “is brewed the real poison of America-Last propaganda.”

President Dickey got a grant of $75,000 from the Carnegie Corporation for his new course. The Tribune reports of this: “Alger Hiss, former State Department official, who has been accused of being a Communist, is president of a sister trust, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”It finds also that Mr. Hiss and President Dickey were both at the San Francisco Conference for the State Department. Likewise: “Dickey studied at Harvard Law School while Felix Frankfurter was there.”This is typical Tribunese. One person who has been smeared is used next time to smear another by connecting them, at least in the same sentence.

As educational material Dartmouth could not have asked for a more graphic demonstration to the class than the Tribune’s smearing of the college. Any student would recognize in it the tactics Dartmouth had described as “justifying something by defaming somebody who opposes it.”

2

THE Dartmouth articles are obviously a part of a campaign the Tribune initiated last January leveled at other Ivy League colleges. The Tribune’s exposé began with the fearsome headline “Red Poison Tinges Ivy of Harvard.”

The opening paragraph: “Agitators who attempt to turn the minds of college students against the American Constitution and American nationalism have infiltrated into the ivied halls and commons of Harvard, Yale and Princeton.”

The first supporting evidence of this is a quotation of a Harvard janitor, who said: “The students now are no redder than some of them were 20 years ago, and, of course, we’ve always had a few nuts on the faculty.”

This is followed by: “The attorney general of an eastern sin to slapped his desk with the palm of his hand and said: ‘Sure there are Communists leaching at both Yale and Harvard, but how can you prove it on them? Don’t use my name.’”

Then follows a particularly choice bit of Tribunese: “In textbooks, student activities and the writings and speeches of some instructors, THE TRIBUNE found proof that the Ivy League is infested with the pedagogic termites of communism, socialism, world federalism, Anglo-American federalism and other foreign-born schemes which would weaken or destroy the American republic.”

In an indiscriminate listing of “professors who frequently come out from behind their books to toe the Communist Party line” appears the name of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who is actually one of the most assiduous anti-Communist speakers and writers. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize history, The Aye of Jackson, and of an incisive article on American Communism written for Henry Luce. Only an illiterate could be unfamiliar with Schlesinger’s prodigious journalistic attacks on Communism at home and abroad, in the labor unions and in the Wallace movement, that have appeared in the leading American magazines and newspapers.

“Red Teaching at Harvard Is Insidious" was another Tribune headline. Under it came first the Tribune’s respects to Granville Hicks and Felix Frankfurter, who haven’t been at Harvard for ten years but neither of whom the Tribune likes. Then a paragraph that Harvard professors had opposed the Barnes bill “to eliminate communists from the public schools. Nothing of the fact that outstanding leaders of education in Massachusetts opposed the Barnes bill as an invitation to a witch hunt.

Then this: “Harvard students said they were unaware of any propaganda in their classes. Other persons familiar with college routine said it would require an exceptionally shrewd student to detect subversive instruction, if it is disguised as logical examination of a subject whether the subject be capitalism or the republican form of government — ‘from all sides.

In short, no propaganda could be discovered; therefore it must be insidious.

For lack of Communism the Tribune turned to another of its phobias, “How Harvard Is I aught by Anglophiles" makes a cover-all to reveal that. Harvard has a Rhodes scholar on its faculty in Crane Brinton, whose most recent book is The United States and Britain. This is treason to the Tribune and good for three columns.

“One of Britain’s Charlie McCarthys on the Harvard Faculty is Clarence ( rane Brinton, the piece opens. Actually Professor Brinton s special field is the French Revolution. He is the author of The Anatomy of Revolution, The Jacobins, The Lives of Talleyrand, and Nietzsche, among other scholarly works, and is the stimulating chairman of one of Harvard’s most notable adventures in productive scholarship, the Society of Fellows. He served for three years overseas as a special assistant in the Office of Strategic Services. A close reading of The United States and Britain reveals some passages that pay his respects to the kind of mischievous journalism the Tribune but tens on.

In other pieces the Tribune poured out its malevolence on Harvard’s great philosophy teachers, William Ernest Hocking and Ralph Barton Perry, who have ventured to think in world terms, on Zechariah Chafee, Jr., eminent champion of freedom of speech, and of course on the Nieman fellowships, which are dedicated to responsible journalism.

Professor Chafee was a special target of the Tribune. Langdell Professor of Law, he has had a long career crowded with authorship of distinguished books on freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and with public service, most recently as the United Slates delegate on the United Nations Commission on Freedom of Information and of the Press. Here his efforts to combat the Russian attack on the American press and to free channels of international news from censorship were handicapped by the record of the Tribune in foreign news reporting.

3

THE Colonel’s reporter then tackled Yale. But there something stayed his hand. The Colonel went to Yale. After the headline “Democratic Spirit Lives on at Yale,” the piece opened with these intelligent words: —

“Yale is the school that glamorized American college life in the 19th century. It introduced secret societies, class fights, the senior rail fence, glee clubs, bands, cheer leaders and sports spectacles.

“In its golden age, Yale inspired the Frank Merriwell tradition. Yale’s great coach, Walter Camp, was the first to raise football to big league eminence, and many ol the stars are enshrined in Yale’s annals today as immortals.”

Only at the end is there a breath of suspicion, quickly suppressed: —

“A visitor may meet with rumors and charges of propaganda of various sorts being preached in the classroom of one professor or another, but such practice would be difficult to prove. [It was difficult to prove at Harvard loo. but that did not stay the headlines.] In his annual report a few years ago, President Charles Seymour declared there was no foundation for the charge that ‘the teaching courses are made vehicles of social and political propaganda.’”

So, on to Princeton. There headlines run: “Princeton Most British Ivy Leaguer”; “Reverse 1777; British Back at Princeton — Rhodes Scholars Are Dominant”; “Super-State Ideas Hailed in Ivy League—Internationalists Find Stronghold ; “Globafldeas Get Highbrow Allegiance.”

What is the case against Princeton?

“Princeton since the regime of Woodrow Wilson has been known as the most British of all Ivy League schools, a second home for Oxford s Rhodes scholars.

“Anglophiles and disciples of the Marshall Plan and various world government schemes are numerous, but Communists, if present at all, are under cover. . . .” So much for the first day.

Then came this historical item: “Some observers trace the beginning of the reoccupation of Princeton by the British from the regime of Woodrow Wilson. He left Princeton to lead the United State to war at Britain’s side, and also introduced buroeracy to this country.”

Princeton is discovered to have had seventy-two Rhodes scholars in forty-four years, more than either Harvard or Yale. Five are listed as teaching at Princeton. A long section follows on the menace of Rhodes scholarships. There was a convention of Rhodes scholars at Princeton last year. The undergraduate association of the five Princeton professors with Oxford is delineated as an insidious influence through about three columns.

Next day comes ihc “Super-State” for its headline. “Student interest in international affairs is greater today than at any previous time.” “Much of the present propaganda for the support of the Marshall Plan is traced to Wall Street influence. . . .” Wall Street bankers serve on the Eastern college boards. Professors speak in support of the Marshall Plan. Some of them sign petitions for it. There are exchange scholarships between this country and England. Shocking!

4

THE violence of the slanders on Harvard was matched only by their stupidity. A mystifying headline staled: “Reds Supply ’Kit ‘ on Education.” No one at Harvard had even heard of any “Red Kits.” Cutting through the involved irrelevaneies of Tribune writing, what one got to at the bottom of the piece was a statement that “Walter S. Steele, chairman of the national security committee of the American Coalition of Patriotic, ‘ivic and Fraternal Societies, recently told the House Committee on Un-American Activities how Communists use Russian studies in colleges to serve their own purposes.” There followed a column of type purporting to describe allegations of Mr. Steele’s about Russian propagandists distributing “teaching kits” wherever they could get them in. This was not even claimed to have any other relation to Harvard than that Harvard was offering regional studies on China and Russia.

This is booby-trap reporting. Only an alert reader, paying close attention throughout, would separate the rehash of Mr. Steele’s bugaboos for the Un-American Activities Committee from the tiny item of news that Harvard offers regional studies, including studies on Russia.

The opening paragraph of that article is typical Tribune: “Eastern universities, always notorious in higher educational circles of the country for their internationalist sympathies, have placed themselves in the forepart of a movement to introduce ‘regional studies’ of the world.” There seems to be something sinister in this; in the third paragraph it turns up: “One Worlders, anglophiles, communists and other apostles of foreign causes support the internationalist courses and attempt to control or profit by such studies as Harvard is offering.”

The Tribune’s concept of education evidently is that no one should learn anything about the world outside the United States. It was our grievous lack of specialists in strategic areas during the war that led the government to ask the universities to set up wartime area or regional studies for military and diplomatic officers. The post-war regional studies are an attempt to prepare trained people to represent this country in parts of the world vital to American interests.

1 submit that the time has come to ask what the credentials of the Chicago Tribune are, to criticize the universities. While Harvard’s tough-minded James B. Conant was directing the atomic research that crushed Japan, while Dartmouth’s Dickev was informing the American people on ihe efforts of the State Department to organize a world for peace — what was the ’Tribune doing? One might ask the then Secretary of War.

Testifying at the Pearl Harbor hearings. Secretary Henry L. Stimson stated that the Tribune “during the very last week before Pearl Harbor made a most disloyal and most unbelievable attack on the chief work of the (ieneral Staff, it published practically in full the strategic and tactical plans of the General Staff . . . the most highly secret paper in the possession of the government. . . . The impact of such a blow was very severe. . . .”

In the midst of war an indictment of the Tribune for disclosing our possession of the Japanese code collapsed when the military felt obliged to decline to release strategic evidence to the Justice Department. On the floor of the Congress, Colonel McCormick was challenged by Representative Ray mond S. McKeough of Illinois “as being guilty of Treason” for published statements. Both Tokyo Rose and Hitler’s Haw-Haw continually quoted from the Tribune in their assaults on the wartime morale of American soldiers. Its Americanism in the present world erisis is mirrored in the editorial “They Asked tor It printed when the Berlin issue was at a menacing phase, with this final paragraph: —

“To say that The American spokesmen were stupid and incompetent is to take the most favorable view of their action. It is by no means unthinkable that the gang which had exposed the fleet to the Japs at Pearl Harbor to get into one war had made up their minds to repeat the maneuver by exposing the American army of occupation to the Russians in Berlin and Bavaria to get into a not her.”

The Tribune with its slanted and twisted news stands out as an obsolete anomaly in an era of responsible journalism. Under Colonel Frank Knox the Chicago Daily News used to caricature the Tribune owner as “Col. MeCosmick,”a comic character. That is a kinder verdict than history will render.