The UCLA archives were open only a couple of days a week, but I was on a mission top find the truth about Raymond B. Allen, leading academic red hunter and UCLA’s first chancellor. I eventually got in and asked the archivist if she had any material from the 1940’s and 50’s concerning the philosophy department or the UCLA chancellor’s office. She brought the department stuff first. In the first box I opened was a stack of letters about an inch thick from the winter and spring of 1947, protesting the hiring of somebody named Max Otto to the prestigious Flint professorship.
Someone had taken the trouble to walk them over from the department to the archives.
The letters were obviously from very conservative people, but they were not the kind of shrill, fact-free yelling we hear today. They were thoughtful and often moving. Otto, a prominent pragmatist, had been identified by the Los Angeles Examiner as an atheist The letter writers were deeply concerned, even fearful, about having an atheist teaching the youth of California.
Shades, I thought, of Socrates! —Some things are truly perennial.
There was a lot of other stuff in the box, including some letters the chair of the department had written in answer to the protestors. They stoutly defended both Otto and the department, and underscored the nature of academic freedom. But there was only about half a dozen of them. Why so few?
One possibility was that in those days every single letter had to be typewritten; there was no putting a basic version in your computer and then editing it for different recipients. The chair, Donald Piatt, had probably gotten tired. His secretary had doubtless gotten tireder.
But there was another possibility: maybe Piatt had just decided that the protest was so trivial that responding was not worth the effort. In that case, the letters showed how impotent right-wing protests were in 1947, in contrast to the later brunt of the McCarthy Era proper, in the early 1950’s.
This turned out to be wrong; in fact the protestors appear, as Scare recounts, to have succeeded in blocking Otto’s appointment. The protest over Otto, moreover, was merely one in a series of events that concerned the teaching of atheism in the philosophy department. These continued, as far as I now know, through the national uproar over Angela Davis, in 1968—over twenty years later.
This illustrates an important feature of archival work. The fact is, when a document or a set of them surfaces in an archive, you have no idea whatsoever —zero—what it means until you see what came before and after it. So the temporal sequence in which an expression stands determines its meaning. Put that in your logic book and smoke it!