A shameful episode in Harvard's history

Boston Globe (aka The National SOCIALIST Review) ^ | 11/14/2004 | Jeff Jacoby

[worldclass]

Why would Harvard have embraced such a man? With everything that was known about the Nazis in 1934 -- their violent anti-Semitism, their book-burning, the concentration camps into which they were herding their enemies -- why would Harvard have treated a Nazi functionary like Hanfstaengl with such courtesy? Why would it let itself be used, in the words of historian Stephen Norwood, "to help cloak the Nazi cause with a layer of legitimacy?" In time, of course, Harvard became staunchly anti-Nazi. (Conant would go on to play a key national defense role during World War II.) But where was its moral judgment when it could have done the most good -- when Nazi Germany was relatively weak and Hitler's aggression had not yet begun?

[worldclass]

Liberals never met a terrorist thug they didn't like.

[gcruse]

This article isn't exactly praising the guy. What's your point? America was not anti-Nazi in the thirties.

[LibWhacker]

Why would Harvard have embraced such a man?

At first I thought they were talking about Ted Kennedy.

[worldclass]

I don't understand your question. Jacoby, a conservative, is pointing out how Harvard coddled a Nazi supporter under the guise of free speech. The same still happens on campuses, as liberal supporters of the PLO and Islamic terrorists would prove.

[Tacis]

"why would Harvard have treated a Nazi functionary like Hanfstaengl with such courtesy?"

It is an issue of equitable tokenism. They treat thousands of communist and neocommunist, anti-American, capitalist-hating, idiot elitists with extreme courtesy and affection, hell, one Nazi qualifies as an affirmative action overture!

[gcruse]

When Boston.com condemns the New York Times for Walter Duranty's rosy coverage of Stalin's atrocities, that will be news.

I just watched a fascinating appearance at Florida State by Tammy Bruce on C-Span that had some of the students frothing.
Free speech isn't as bad off as you might think.

[tsomer]

Jacoby, a conservative, is pointing out how Harvard coddled a Nazi supporter under the guise of free speech.

I think we're a little quick to judge people in history from our relatively comfortable situation.

In the 1930's Germany's options were narrowing: economy shot to hell by war reparations, Stalin in Russia explicitly targeting them for his revolution, it's people humiliated and dispirited.

That partly explains the disaster Hitler, and may mitigate their guilt to some degree.

But it is certainly instructive. We should remember that we're no different from them, and placed under similar strains would probably generate the same kind of evil. That's why we study history. It's our fortune to have had, overall, leaders who understand this.

I think we have one such leader today, by the grace of God.

[VOA]

We should remember that we're no different from them, and placed under similar strains
would probably generate the same kind of evil.

That's why I usually give a "hold on a second" when I hear fellow conservatives
lambast FDR.

There was plenty to dislike about the old boy...but considering we didn't
go full Communist or Fascist was a pretty good trick, IMHO.

[frannie]

My son thinks Tammy Bruce is one liberal who has stood up for President Bush. She has stated that without security here in the U.S.A. all of our domestic concerns will come to naught.

Could you let us Freepers in on some of what she said?

Frannie

[Mears]

Thanks for posting this. I read it this morning but don't know how to post articles and was hoping someone picked up on it.

Good old Harvard----it never ceases to amaze me.

[spinestein]

"Harvard, like other elite institutions, was largely unmoved by the early horrors of the Hitler regime. "It is disturbing to see the indifference of American higher education to what was going on in Germany," he said last week. "Harvard had repeated opportunities to take a principled stand against the Nazis, and passed them up.""


It is interesting to find out about the refusal of educated people to acknowledge the gathering danger of the Nazis until they had actually taken over most of Europe. The intelligentsia of that time believed in pacifism and The League of Nations as a universal policy that would get rid of war once and for all. The only problem with it was Hitler and his followers didn't believe in pacifism (a trait shared by all dictators everywhere).

[gcruse]

There was plenty to dislike about the old boy...but considering we didn't
go full Communist or Fascist was a pretty good trick, IMHO.

If he'd been allowed to pack the Supreme Court, we might have.

[gcruse]

Frannie, the CSPAN broadcast lasted over an hour.  Here's the snippet I took down.

[VOA]

If he'd been allowed to pack the Supreme Court, we might have.

Absolutely agreed. The future swung in the balance and it was good that
FDR DIDN'T get his way all the time.

[frannie]

Perhaps you are right. But in FDR's first reelection the deficit was greater that the revenues.

Receipts $3,923,000,000 -- outlays $8,228,000,000 --
surplus or deficit $-4,304,000,000.

Taken from the World Almanac.[New York Times publication]

Put this in today's figures, our deficit for this year would be 1.9% of our receipts. Too much to figure, try it it is outlandish.

Would FDR have been reelected if he had not put us in sooooo much debt at that time? I am not sure anyone understood this at the time. I was only 13, so am sure I could not have grasped the magnitude of this.

Frannie

[Savage Beast]

Uh...why do you ask? They're doing it right now with the 21st century version of the Nazis.

[frannie]

Thanks. There are several links, perhaps one will cover that exchange.

I pick her comments up from other sites but I can't recall what they are.

Frannie

[x]

I think we're a little quick to judge people in history from our relatively comfortable situation.

True.

We should remember that we're no different from them, and placed under similar strains would probably generate the same kind of evil.

I see your point, and I think I agree, but it's worth thinking it out further. Put in the same situation, we might well do the same thing. Yet isn't something of our own "situation" in fact "us" -- what we believe, aspire to and fear? How do you separate out who we are from our history? And if we have a greater consciousness of evil wouldn't that make us in some way "better" than people were then?

I don't know. It's a big "if," but if some people are more aware of the possibilities of genocide, it may mean that humanity has learned something. It would be arrogant to pride ourselves on advantages that we didn't earn ourselves, but I wonder if the "no better" or "no different" idea doesn't encourage moral relativism. Maybe the problem is that in a crunch, when it matters, we can't be counted on to have learned or improved our character, any more than the Harvard men of 1934 could. Again, I don't know.

Kudos to those who saw fit to protest in 1934, and this is a fascinating historical find, but dragging it up again after seventy years to discredit "Harvard" looks like a low blow, and a silly one. The great board game in which we try to discredit people for things that happened before they were born is of little use.

To be sure, there were right choices and wrong ones at the time, but we have a knowledge that people at the time didn't have that turns up the contrast on things, so that small acts of courage or cowardice come out looking much starker and less ambiguous than they did at the time, and questions that seemed local or marginal come to have a universal and absolute significance.

Our own age has made its own compromises with evil, and without past examples like that of the 1940s, who's to say that our choices would have been better than they were? If we are better, it's because others made some of our mistakes for us.

[VOA]

Perhaps you are right. But in FDR's first reelection the deficit was greater that the revenues.

Who can say?

I'm not carrying water for FDR...just saying that somehow, someway he did
lead the country through perilous waters without wrecking the ship of state.
You need only looks at the Communist strains in some Hollywood movies of the day
or the noise from the Bund to see that there were siren calls from either extreme.

At the same time, I do acknowledge that it wasn't FDR that jumpstarted the revived economy.
I go with the aircraft worker recalled to work to supply new planes to the
Brits in the late 1930s...
that was quoted as saying "God Bless Adolph Hitler" when he got his first earned
paycheck in years.

[bert]

I was thinking of the 90's and the word era in place of the word episode.