McCarthyism on the Charles: The Life and Times of Labour Historian Ray Ginger before and After His Dismissal from Harvard University

Abstract

Born in 1924, Ray Ginger, the eminent labour historian, entered boyhood during the early years of the Great Depression, experiencing its ravages firsthand as a result of a family calamity. Spending most of his youth in Indiana, Ginger excelled academically in high school before matriculating at the University of Chicago as a precocious 16-year old freshman in 1940. During his two years at the school, Ginger came to adopt left-wing politics and upon reaching his 18 th birthday in 1942, he enlisted in the military. As the citizenry of the United States rallied around the war effort, the nation's landscape looked drastically different than the decade before with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal 1 being extended to virtually every nook and cranny of American society. Through its work with the unemployed movement and its active role in organizing the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the Great Depression, the Left was clearly in its ascendancy in the United States with the nation's largest socialist organization, the Communist Party United States of America (CPUSA), 2 achieving a peak membership of 85,000 in 1942. Returning to civilian life approximately six months after the war's conclusion in 1946, Ginger resumed his academic course work, earning a Master's degree in Economics from the University of Michigan while becoming increasingly active in left-wing politics. Because of his interest in becoming a working class organizer, Ginger obtained a job in a Detroit-area auto factory in the late 1940s while putting the finishing touches on his magnum opus on Eugene V. Debs, the distinguished labour leader and Socialist Party head who was perhaps the nation's foremost radical political leader of the twentieth century if not of all time. In 1949, when Ginger's seminal biography, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs, appeared, the country's political climate had changed dramatically. With the onset of the Cold War shortly after the Second World War's con-missed from his faculty appointment when he declined to disclose whether he currently was or had ever been a CPUSA member. Assuming that the accounting of Ginger's termination in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports is correct, this is the first case to be made public "in which a Harvard professor was a s ked to resign because he refused to respond to ch a rges that he was a Commu n i s t ." 1 9 According to FBI files, the university and the Bureau had a solid, close relationship with Harvard administrators continually supplying information to agents concerning Ginger's first wife, Ann Fagan Ginger, in 1954. The events surrounding Ginger's termination can be reconstructed from FBI files. Harvard Business School officers were provided with a tip from an anonymous source on 14 June 1954 that Ginger and his wife could be called to testify in front of the Massachusetts Commission to Investigate Communism. On 15 June 1954, university administrators arranged a meeting with Ginger at 4:30 p.m. and asked him ...