Education was indeed, as Velde put it, “a very fertile field” for anticommunist investigations in the 1950s, if only because so many academics, if they had not actually joined the party, had been sympathetic to communism in the 1930s. Because the University of Chicago and Harvard are private institutions, Charles Morris, Rudolf Carnap, and Philipp Frank were sheltered from some of the anticommunist pressures applied to their colleagues at public institutions. Still, all three experienced various kinds of anticommunist pressures in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Hearings at the University of Chicago

Morris witnessed two investigations at the University of Chicago, the first in 1935 before Carnap had arrived at the university. That investigation was precipitated by radical students who had distributed revolutionary literature to the city's poor. At the same time, the university's May Day celebration of 1934 drew the press's attention to “the enormous gap that had opened between [the] University's students and the climate of opinion prevailing in the city” (McNeill 1991, 62–63). The university's reputation as a hotbed of radicalism was also fed by the early anticommunist book The Red Network (Dilling 1934). The issue ignited when Charles Walgreen, of drugstore fame, wrote to President Hutchins that he was withdrawing his niece from the college: “I am unwilling to have her absorb the Communist influences to which she is assiduously exposed” (in McNeill 1991, 63).