American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

a New York politician, State Senator F. R. Coudert, Jr., was using his position as co-chair of New York’s Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Public Educational System to orchestrate a highly publicized witch-hunt against alleged subversives in New York City’s public universities. By September 1941, City College alone had dismissed twenty-eight staff members, some of whom were members of the New York branch of the Teachers’ Union—the same union to which Oppenheimer belonged in Berkeley. The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF), to which Oppenheimer also belonged, published a statement condemning the dismissals. In response, Senator Coudert accused the ACDIF of having ties to communists, and a New York Times editorial lent support to Coudert’s attack. Into this political thicket waded Oppenheimer with a strongly worded protest. His letter of October 13, 1941, was by stages polite in tone, witty, ironical and then cuttingly sarcastic. Oppenheimer reminded the senator that the Bill of Rights guaranteed not merely the right to hold any belief, however radical, but the right to express that belief in speech or in writing with “anonymity.” The activities, he wrote, of “teachers who were communists or communist sympathizers consisted precisely in meeting, speaking their views, and publishing them (often anonymously), in engaging, that is, in practices specifically protected by the Bill of Rights.” Concluding on a note of defiance, he observ...