Robert Murray's Two Red Scares

Lee W. Formwalt

Nearly fifty-five years ago, with the ink still drying on his new Ph.D. degree in history from Ohio State University, Robert K. Murray landed a job as assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and began revising his dissertation in an effort to get it published. He had written about the Red Scare of 1919 under the direction of twentieth-century historian Foster Rhea Dulles. A young professor with two kids and four preparations a day, Murray found it hard to revise and rewrite, but by 1952, he was finished and ready to find a publisher.

While Senator Joe McCarthy was getting national attention with his charges of Communist infiltration of the federal government at the highest levels, Bob Murray got the good news that Little Brown & Company would publish his book after he made certain revisions. Murray completed the revisions in 1953, but by that time, McCarthyism was at its height, and the publisher reneged stating that "under the circumstances, they thought that it wasn't wise for them to bring this book out."

McCarthyism, or the second Red Scare, not only delayed the publication of Murray's book, but it affected his life as a young assistant professor anxious to secure tenure at Penn State. Last month, I had a conversation with Murray in which he recollected that his dean and department head had called him in and said there were "people on the campus asking questions about you." Meanwhile his parents in Columbus, Ohio, told him "that there were people in the neighborhood asking questions about me and my background, what I had done."

In 1954, when McCarthy's hearings on the army were being televised, Murray received a letter indicating that although he was not a security risk, his "record would look a whole lot better if I also joined the American Legion." But Murray "was not a joiner" and he did not become a legionnaire. "I'll tell you, as a young man, I was really scared. I didn't like people running around asking about me, never knowing who they were, why they were doing it, what was going to happen." He knew colleagues who lost their jobs because they had attended a Communist Party meeting in the depths of the Depression in the 1930s. But Murray had never gone to such meetings and he had served as an intelligence officer with top security clearance in World War II. That record and the fact that he was an elder in the Presbyterian Church probably helped him keep his job at Penn State, despite the subject of his book.

Joe McCarthy's power quickly waned once the American public saw him in action in the Army-McCarthy hearings. At about that time Murray was encouraged to submit his manuscript to the University of Minnesota Press. Murray later learned that Hubert Humphrey played a role in getting the University of Minnesota Press to publish the book in 1955. By that time, the Senate had censured McCarthy and Murray's Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 was well received. In 1964, McGraw-Hill picked up the paperback rights and for several generations it has been the classic introduction and resource on the outbreak of nativist hysteria that characterized the short period between the end of World War I and the 1920s.

I asked Murray about his involvement in the Organization of American Historians, which he joined as a graduate student in 1947 when it was still the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. In 1969 the office of OAH secretary-treasurer was split and the fourth and last secretary-treasurer, William Aeschbacher, became treasurer and the office of executive secretary (later, executive director) was created. When Aeschbacher planned to step down as treasurer, OAH President John Higham asked Murray to replace Aeschbacher. Murray agreed and began his term in 1976 under President Richard Leopold. Within two years he was serving under a very different president, Marxist historian Eugene Genovese. As treasurer, Murray felt compelled to talk with the new leader right away about finances: "I told Gene that we can't spend left and right now, like it's running out of a faucet, and I said I want to keep the budget balanced, and he looked at me and he said, 'Did you ever know Joe Stalin to have an unbalanced budget?'"

The biggest challenge Murray faced during his eight years as OAH treasurer was keeping the budget balanced at a time when the board wanted to undertake many new activities. It wanted to do more publishing, "encourage more awards," expand precollegiate teacher participation, "and increase the size of the convention to take care of that. There was a lot of pressure to recruit minorities, particularly women." Dues were increased and "I suppose I can be proud that we kept a balanced budget and we increased the net worth of the organization through investments."

I asked Bob Murray what he might tell graduate students in American history today: "I'd say if you desire to be a professional historian and engage your mind with other professional historians, and understand what the profession stands for, what our modus operandi is, what kinds of standards we choose to follow, you have simply got to join your professional organization."

As for his senior colleagues, he hoped that OAH members, "particularly those who have made a good living, particularly those who have written textbooks, who have written popular history, who have made money off their activities, I would think that they would particularly be interested in [providing] seed money to support the OAH in [its] many activities. It is money well spent." In addition to bequests to their universities and their churches, senior historians "ought to reserve something aside for the very profession that has nurtured them throughout their academic life, and I feel very strongly about that. I think that membership in the OAH and participation in the OAH is just as important to me as my academic associations and my university. They go hand in hand, and I would hope that many members, again, particularly those who have found this profession beneficial to them economically, would do so."

Former OAH Treasurer Bob Murray has backed up his words with action. He and his wife have left a very generous bequest to OAH in their will. Bob has retired to Tampa, Florida. His contribution to our understanding of the Red Scare of 1919 is immense. He got a real taste of the McCarthy Red Scare himself in the 1950s. And what about today? "The CIA, the FBI, and other agencies," noted Murray, "are markedly curtailing the normal civil liberties procedures which we have enjoyed as Americans, just as old [Attorney General A.] Mitchell [Palmer] did back in the 1919-1920 period with respect to suspected radicals in the United States. So I think we have to be careful, you know, and it's not as virulent yet as the McCarthy period, but Muslim clergymen, legitimate Muslim communities, have a real concern about when at any time, given a particular set of circumstances, this could become virulent." With such observation, is there any greater justification for the practice of our craft?