UW observes anniversary of Canwell hearings

In 1948, the University of Washington fired three tenured professors for alleged Communist sympathies. It was a controversial action in a time full of such actions. McCarthy, the blacklist, loyalty oathsmost Americans have heard of post-war anti-Communi st fervor, though it is hard for those who didn't live through it to understand what happened and why.

To address some of those questions, the University will mark the 50^th anniversary of the firings this winter with a series of events called the "All Powers Project." An interdisciplinary effort involving speeches, panel discussions and even a dramatic recreation of legislative hearings on the subject, the project's events are open to the public. The University Libraries has created a website listing All Powers Project events and a reading list. The URL is: http://www.lib.washington.edu/exhibits/AllPowers

What happened in 1948 was precipitated by the creation of the state's Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. Popularly called the Canwell Committee after its chairman, Rep. Albert Canwell, R-Spokane, the panel was given "a ll powers necessary and convenient" to "investigate the activities of groups and organizations whose membership includes persons who are Communists, or any other organization known or suspected to be dominated or controlled by a foreign power."

The committee conducted two sets of hearingsone on the Washington Pension Union and the other on the University of Washington, which it believed harbored many Communists on the faculty. Eleven professors testified during the hearings. Some admitted t hey had belonged to the Communist Party and named others they had known in it; some admitted past membership but refused to name others, and three refused to say whether or not they were or ever had been members.

After the legislative hearings, the University held its own hearingsbefore the Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom of the Faculty Senate. Six men were charged: Herbert Phillips, Joseph Butterworth and Ralph Gundlach, who had refused to answer th e committee's questions about their activities; and Harold Eby, Garland Ethel and Melville Jacobs, who admitted past membership in the Communist Party but who had refused to name others.

The committee recommended that only Gundlach be fired, but they were overruled by President Raymond Allen, who recommended to the regents that Phillips and Butterworth also be terminated. The regents decided to fire all three men. Eby, Ethel and Jaco bs were allowed to remain, but were put on probation for two years and forced to sign a loyalty oath.

The aftermath of the hearings was significant, both for the individuals involved and for the campus. Phillips, Butterworth and Gundlach never worked in academia again. Gundlach, a psychology professor, managed to find a new career as a clinical psych ologist, but Phillips, a philosophy professor, was forced to become a laborer and Butterworth, a teacher of Chaucer and Old English, went on public assistance.

As for the University, it turned down both literary critic Kenneth Burke and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer for Walker-Ames professorships for their alleged support of communist "front" organizations, and in turn found itself rejected as the site of s everal planned professional conferences. According to the late University historian Charles Gates, "a number of departments on the campus had occasion to discover during the ensuing years the doubtful esteem in which the University of Washington was held at other institutions."

Washington State was among the first in the nation to create a legislative committee on un-American activities and the UW was one of the first schools to be a target of such an investigation. Moreover, according to one historian, the University's deci sion to the fire the three professors set a precedent that allowed other schools to declare Communists unfit to teach. Ellen Schrecker, author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, says this: "The University of Washington case had cleared the way. Once the anti-Communist consensus and the machinery for enforcing it was in place, it was to become all too easy for academic institutions to turn against other types of political undesirables."

Schrecker is among those who will speak as part of the All Powers Project. See A listing of All Powers Project events for a complete schedule. ¶