Such is the present attitude of the ruling class of Harvard toward the issue of free speech. The attitude of the students was delightfully set forth by an editorial in the Harvard “Crimson,” at the time of the Liberal Club lecture of Wilfred Humphries, Y. M. C. A. worker from Russia. The “Crimson” was for Free Speech—But! What the “Crimson” wished to forbid was “propaganda”; and it made clear that by this term it meant any and all protest against things established. Said the cautious young editor: “Not prohibited by law, propaganda creeps in and is accepted by many as an almost essential part of freedom of speech!” This is as persuasive as the communications of the Harvard Union to the liberal students, barring various radicals from the platform, on the ground that the Union did not permit “partisan” speakers: the Union’s idea of non-partisan speakers being such well-poised and judicious conservatives as Admiral Sims and Detective Burns! As the old saying runs: “Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is your doxy!” There is a standing rule at Harvard barring “outside” speakers who discuss “contentious contemporaneous questions of politics or economics”; and this rule was used to bar Mrs. Pankhurst!
I tell you of these petty incidents of discrimination; and yet, if we are to keep our sense of proportion, we must state that in the totality of American universities, Harvard ranks, from the point of view of academic liberalism, among the three or four best. There was no interference with its professors during the war hysteria—and I found but one other large institution, the University of Chicago, of which this statement may be made. Also, Harvard has to its credit one post-war case, in which academic freedom was gravely involved, and in which the Harvard tradition proved itself still alive. This is a curious and dramatic story, and I will tell it in detail.
In the summer of 1918 the United States Army invaded Archangel in Northern Russia, and Vladivostok in Eastern Siberia, seizing the territory of a friendly people and killing its inhabitants without the declaration of war required by the constitution of the United States. This invasion was the blackest crime in American public history, and was denounced by many of our leading thinkers. Also it was denounced by five obscure Russian Jews, mere children in age, living in the East-side slums of New York City. Four boys and a girl printed a leaflet, asking the American people not to kill their Russian compatriots, and they distributed these leaflets in public—for which crime they were arrested, taken to prison, and beaten and tortured so severely that one of them died a few days later. The surviving four were placed on trial, and after a hideous travesty of justice were given sentences of from fifteen to twenty years in prison.