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Two Letters from 1936 on Science & Society, the Marxist Quarterly and the New Republic

The extent to which the political dimension of academic life in the USA was altered by the 1930s may be measured by examining an exposé from the prior decade: The Goose-Step by Upton Sinclair. This author, a Socialist best known for his novel The Jungle (1906), despaired of higher education in the 1920s. The campuses, he held, were craven places beholden to wealthy benefactors. Since dissenting faculty were shown the door by boards of trustees, professors understood orthodoxy in defense of the established order to be requisite. The American university, charged Sinclair, was handmaiden to ‘‘capital.’’ Higher education in the 1930s may not have been handmaiden to Capital, but the influence of Karl Marx was far more widely felt in that decade than it had been in the 1920s. A new generation of scholars emerged, shaped profoundly by such events as the Great Depression and the Nazi seizure of power, by new winds of liberal reform in Washington, and by the apparent contrast between the rapidly industrializing Soviet Union and a capitalist world in the grips of crisis. Many graduate students and new faculty in the 1930s were aroused by the social reawakening reflected in mass movements of the unemployed, labor, and the left. They felt the influence of trends of opinion among American intellectuals outside the universities, namely the sharp leftward turn among novelists, poets, critics, artists, actors, and musicians. During the interwar years the mode of intellectual production did not center as exclusively on the academy as it would in postwar decades, when population boom and exceptional economic growth combined with Cold War expenditures to compel a tremendous expansion of higher education. During the Depression intellectual life still centered upon small independent magazines whose