Defend Academic Freedom: Stop McCarthyism Now!

New York: Labor Youth League, 1955. Offset. Bifolium. [4] pp. 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. Very good. Item #7445

Pamphlet promoting Academic Freedom Week in the United States in a national effort to defend against McCarthyism.

The pamphlet outlines the damage that the anticommunist movement had done to American cultural life since 1950, stating that “the witch-hunters and the demagogues have, like rats, gnawed away at the integrity of our education.” The McCarthyites were “making orthodoxy the test of scholarship,” “servility the measure of academic competence,” and making science “the handmaiden of the militarists.”

The pamphlet compares McCarthy to Hitler, through the “Big Lie that ‘Communism menaces America.’ Like Hitler, the McCarthyites cry that theirs is a ‘crusade against Bolshevism. … Like Hitler, the McCarthyites use that cry to attack not only the Communists, but all those who stand for social progress.” The work boldly concludes: “McCARTHY AND McCARTHYISM MUST GO! LET THE CLASSROOMS RING WITH A DETERMINATION TO MAKE OUR SCHOOLS CITADELS OF DEMOCRACY!”

A rare surviving document of left-wing resistance in the 1950s.

Price: $750.00