CU Red Scare report released (University of Colorado's secret report)

The Daily Camera ^ | 5/11/02 | Clint Talbott/staff

[LarryLied]

The University of Colorado's secret report naming suspected communists among the Boulder faculty during the Red Scare of the 1950s was made public Friday, nearly 50 years after officials locked it away in a bank vault.

The Board of Regents voted 8-1 to release the 126-page report and a 10-page supplement, abandoning the university's claim that unsealing the document "would do substantial injury to the public interest." [ FULL STORY ]

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A half-century later, professor hears accusers
Daily Camera

It took 51 years for Morris Judd to hear the flimsy accusations that wrecked his career. That's a welcome ray of sunshine. But why did it take so long to arrive?

On Friday, the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to release a 1951 report about suspected subversives. Now we know what some have long suspected: that Judd and others were harassed and persecuted, derided and dismissed because they held beliefs the government hated.

They were persecuted for exercising the First Amendment and academic freedom.

In 1951, Judd was a CU philosophy instructor who had graduated at the top of his class and was much admired by his colleagues and students.

But Judd recalls being called into the office of former CU President Robert L. Stearns and "badgered with questions" about his former political affiliation. (Judd was a registered Democrat.) Judd declined to answer those questions. Stearns told him, "It will go very hard with you if you don't answer my questions."

And so it did. Stearns called Judd a boring teacher, and the regents dismissed him. One regent voted against the dismissal, saying the action was based on rumor and innuendo in the secret report.

The report released Friday reveals the flimsy case against Judd. One unnamed student who spoke to detectives Dudley Hutchinson and Harold Hafer said he'd seen Judd at Communist Party meetings in 1945 or'46. The source said Judd was "90 percent or better a probable Communist" during 1946.

That source said that he was "of the opinion" that the American Youth for Democracy met at Judd's home in March 1947. The AYD had been banned from campus for allegedly being a Communist front group.

The detectives reported that a student recalled Judd telling students that the United States was waging an "imperialistic war in Korea." And Professor David Hawkins told the detectives that Judd was not a Communist, that he was, rather, a Marxist.

Finally, the detectives report Judd's cardinal sin: that he refused to answer the detectives' questions. Judd said the questions were "irrelevant" and that "past political beliefs do not disqualify a person to be a member of the academic community." He was right. His rectitude didn't save his job.

Here's the short version of the evidence against Judd. Someone thinks he recalls seeing Judd at meetings several years prior. Someone else is "of the opinion" that a meeting took place at Judd's home. A student says he called the United States "imperialist."

Such were the innuendoes that ruled and ruined people's lives.

This week, Judd recalled the consequences of the witch hunt. "I suffered the loss of my academic career. This investigation was a horrendous violation not only of my rights, but of the tradition of academic freedom.

"That secret and unwarranted procedure has been compounded by the years of secrecy in withholding the report from the public," Judd stated.

After being summarily dismissed from the university, Judd worked as an office manager at a Greeley junk yard. "Generations of CU students lost the opportunity to study with him," Nina Judd, his daughter, told the regents Thursday.

The witch hunt was launched in 1951, after Congress revealed that Professor Hawkins had once been a communist. Within days, CU ordered an investigation of "subversives" on campus. In May 1951, Hutchinson and Hafer delivered a 126-page report. One month later, Irving Goodman, an assistant professor of chemistry, was summarily fired. Judd's dismissal followed.

In 1953, state legislators pressured the university to release the report, and some professors urged its destruction. In response, CU's president and Colorado's governor announced that the report would not be destroyed. Then, the regents placed the report in a bank vault, where it remained until this year, when the Camera sued for its release.

Last July, I invoked the Colorado Open Records Act in requesting a copy of the report. The university refused. In February, I asked for a partially censored copy — one with all names but five blacked out. The university refused. The Camera sued. (The judge's ruling was still pending on Friday).

It was only after being sued — and having been so urged by the Boulder Faculty Assembly, the CU Faculty Council, the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, the Camera, the Colorado Daily, and Judd himself — that the regents relented.

The contents of the report have been a closely guarded secret since it was completed. Finally on Friday, the regents saw sweet reason. Why did it take so long? Why did they fight so hard? What lessons does this hold?

Those are unresolved questions. With evidence in hand, we'll have a fighting chance of finding answers.

Reach Clint Talbott at (303) 473-1367 or talbottc@thedailycamera.com.

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Full text of the 9/18/51 CU report (PDF)

[speedy]

And now the university will not let you teach there if you are a Republican. I suppose that is what this rag would consider progress. How do we know this guy wasn't let go for incompetence? They used to do that in the 50s, you know.

[Tacis]

Compared to the views of the faculty today, whatever the true level of ultra-left wing, ant-American, liberal extremism in 1951, it was pretty tame. It is a major objective of the ultra left wing conspiracy in the US and around the world to "rehabilitate" those who once worked against the US who were on the left. Thus, the Hollywood traitors are today portrayed as people of principle and any suggestions that there are/were commies in the state department is laughed at. And, it is the media and academia that lead this conspiracy.

[Cicero]

The fear was that if these people took over the universities, they would subvert and wreck them. Well, they subsequently took over the universities, and they have subverted and wrecked them, turning them into centers of mindless leftist conformity and ideological brainwashing.

Anyone who was a Marxist in the 1950s, in the face of what was then known about Stalin and Mao, and who favored the North Korean invasion of South Korea, had a pretty warped mind. Did this fellow actually have a Communist Party card? That strikes me as a technicality.

[Migraine]

And Professor David Hawkins told the detectives that Judd was not a Communist, that he was, rather, a Marxist.

Well, silly me; then it was all just a big misunderstanding? Judd must have thought: "Thanks a lot, Hawkins. You're a true friend."

[ckilmer]

the heart of the red scare of the late forties and early fifies wasn't revealed until 1996 when the national security agency released the venona cables. A total of 300 code names were deciphered of which the NSA was able to identify 100. As it turned out the Roosevelt Admin was riddled with spies as was the Manhanttan project. The Russians recruited mostly through the communist party. The Russians did for Roosevelt Much as the Chinese did for Clinton.For a complete list of PBS web sites on the subject go here PBS did a special on this in feb 2002. From the PBS Web Site

Did you know? The U.S. National Security Agency waited almost 50 years before releasing the first batch of Soviet cables decrypted by the Venona project, most of which were broken between 1947 and 1952. In December 1946, in one of the earliest Venona breakthroughs, Meredith Gardner, an analyst with the Signal Intelligence Service (an NSA forerunner), broke into a 1944 KGB message that gave a list of the leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project, the effort to build an atomic bomb. Twenty-one deciphered KGB cables, all from 1944 and 1945, discuss Julius Rosenberg, who bore the covernames "Antenna" and, later, "Liberal." Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed at New York's Sing Sing Prison on June 19, 1953, were the only persons put to death for espionage in the U.S. during the Cold War. The Venona intercepts reveal that the Soviets never gave Ethel Rosenberg a cover name -- evidence, say her sons Robert and Michael Meeropol, that she was innocent of espionage. In a December 5th, 2001, Associated Press story, David Greenglass admitted he lied under oath about his sister Ethel's involvement in espionage to reduce his own sentence and keep his wife Ruth out of prison. Nearly a half century after the death of his sister, David Greenglass and his wife Ruth are alive and well, living under assumed names in the New York area. Ted Hall, another spy within the Manhattan Project, was a physics prodigy who attended Columbia University at age 14 and graduated from Harvard at age 18. The KGB gave Hall the cover name "Youngster," because when he first passed secrets to the Soviets about the atomic bomb, he was only 19 years old. Hall told his wife Joan that he gave the U.S.S.R. secrets of the atom bomb because he was afraid the U.S. might become a very reactionary power after World War II, and that the Soviet Union was the only country capable of standing up to it. After the war, Hall earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago and eventually moved to England. Neither he nor his principal courier Saville Sax was ever prosecuted. Till the day he died, on November 1, 1999 at the age of 74, Hall never fully admitted to undertaking espionage. Klaus Fuchs, perhaps the most damaging spy within the Manhattan Project, made a full confession in 1950, served nine years in prison, and then moved to Communist East Germany, where he died in 1988. Within months of Fuchs' confession, which led to several arrests, the spies Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant disappeared. Nothing more was heard from them until 1983, when a Harvard researcher identified them as the leading Soviet scientists Joseph Berg and Philip Georgievich Staros. In the end, Venona was seriously compromised by the American William Weisband and the Englishman H.R. "Kim" Philby, both of whom had access to Venona apparently told the Soviets about the program. Venona shows that the KGB's cover names for American concerns included "Enormoz" (the Manhattan Project), "Arsenal" (the U.S. War Department), and "The Bank" (the U.S. Department of State). In a KGB message, a member of the American Communist Party was known as a "Fellowcountryman," while a member of the Young Communist League was called a "Gymnast." To date, the NSA has declassified more than 3,000 messages related to Venona. Yet of the voluminous message traffic sent to Moscow from the KGB's New York office, Venona cryptanalysts were able to decrypt only 49 percent of the 1944 messages, 15 percent of the 1943 messages, and a mere 1.8 percent of the 1942 messages. Many persons known in the Venona traffic only by their cover names have never been identified, including "Quantum," a spy who gave valuable scientific information about the atom-bomb project to the Soviets at a meeting at the Soviet embassy on June 14, 1943. Sources Note: Unless otherwise specified, all sources are NOVA/WGBH. NSA Web site, "Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations, www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/monographs/monograph-1.html. Ibid. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr (Yale University Press, 2000), p. 295. NSA Web site, "Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations, www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/monographs/monograph-1.html. NSA Web site, "Introduction to the VENONA Project," www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/index.html. NSA Web site, "Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations, www.nsa.gov/docs/venona/monographs/monograph-1.html. Haynes & Klehr, p. 313.

[JCG]

Judd declined to answer those questions.

So sorry. But if your boss decides to ask questions that he has a right to know and you refuse to answer and get fired -- well, tough cheese.

Did the boss in this case have the right to know Judd's political affiliations? Wonder where that teaching contract now resides?

America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
Download 8 Mb zip file here (60 minute video)

[detsaoT]

Now we know what some have long suspected: that Judd and others were harassed and persecuted, derided and dismissed because they held beliefs the government hated.

Is sedition protected by the First Amendment? Are we free, as citizens, to champion the downfall of the United States as a nation, as the Communists did from the 30's to the 50's? If we, as a nation, have any brains left, the answer to both questions should still be "No."

:) ttt

[LarryLied]

The writer needs some freeper email. Did you or anyone else read the full report? My PDF is messed up and converting it on line doesn't work.

[LarryLied]

Colorado freeper bump. ..

[Balata]

Thanks for the ping, Larry.
Thought I'd pass along this interesting piece of information.

The authors of the report both died years after their investigation. Hafer died in 1968, and Hutchinson committed suicide in 1970.

[LonePalm]

Gee, now they could just publish the faculty list with a few redactions.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[LarryLied]

Both were no doubt sickened to see the left in ascendancy at that time. Few things bug me more than the refusal of the left and Americans in general to acknowledge the complicity of many here in the crimes committed in the Soviet Union.

[Balata]

I tried to read the full text of the report, but my cmptr keep locking up. It looks to me unlikely there was and documented evidence against Judd. He had a nephew who lived in Canada who was a documented member. A janitor testified Judd's views were radical. He was in a debate and took the opposite side and argued so convincingly that it was determined he must have inside sources to the Communist party. He also wrote for a national magazine called "Society and Culture" which was a large contributor to the feeling Judd was a Communist. There were many unnamed sources, including a known Communist party member, but no solid documentation.

It seems unlikely from what I read that this evidence would stand up to any scrutiny. It appears the powers that be at CU were protecting the case because it was so weak.