Speak Weltfish, Speak Pasternak

The Choice We All Make: Campus Politics and Self Definition.

By Eva Spier

Illustration by Phoebe Wagoner

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“The remaking of life! People who can reason like that may have been around, but they’ve never once known life, never felt its spirit, its soul. For them existence is a lump of coarse material, not yet ennobled by their touch, in need of being processed by them. But life has never been a material, a substance.” – Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

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Until I took my seat in 457 Schermerhorn Extension on Oct. 9, I had never seen so many anthropology professors in the same place at the same time—that is, well-dressed academics donning colorful glasses and casually slipping into different languages. That was my introduction to the current day’s anthropology department, the seven-decades-ago iteration of which I was intimately familiar with. We were gathered on account of a shared interest in Gene Weltfish: an adjunct professor who lectured at Columbia from 1936 to 1953, and the woman Professor Brian Larkin was going to talk about. 

Even before I tossed my sweater to claim a front-row seat, I knew a lot about Weltfish. I knew that she was an academic during the Second Red Scare—a time when anything other than a stark denunciation of Communism was doggedly investigated. And I knew that when Weltfish was persecuted for her left-leaning stances, Columbia’s trustees considered her a political liability. She knew that her academic work was irritating the University, which wanted to keep a low political profile, but continued to engage in transgressions that rendered her culpable by association. 

I kept coming back to Weltfish’s life and work not because I saw her as the pinnacle of moral clarity and success, but because of her temperament. Welfish faced adversity that she might have been inclined to shy away from, and she did it with a pedantic sense of duty. For example, she publicly agreed with the Soviet Union that the United States had used chemical weapons in the Korean War. She participated in organizations that supported racial equality and women's rights that were flagged as anti-American because of their criticisms of capitalism. She was subsequently dismissed, blacklisted, and left unable to find an academic post for the next eight years. 

At first, her treatment struck me plainly as a frustrating incongruence between academia and free speech. But the longer I thought about it, the more her case prompted personal concern. In early adulthood, especially as a college student, you will undergo shifts of a nature which send tremors through your sense of self, and inspire the impulse to wrestle your life into something stable—something compact and heavy enough to place squarely into the palm of your hand and examine. Color will slowly ache into things and slowly ache out of them. You will fall in love, move into a new apartment, experience injury or illness, family members will pass away, and these changes slowly and invariably split and refract the fabric of your world. I regard this impulse to tame life similarly to how I imagine a lepidopterist regards catching a moth and tacking it to a specimen board. It is to want to take the broad collection of your lived experiences, tastes, and inclinations and force them into something coherent. 

To try to stop these shifts would be misguided. And, until now, I suspected that you had to react to them with a stubborn sense of self. Especially given that certain expressions—whether aesthetic or interpersonal or political—will inevitably find friction in the surrounding world. I approached Weltfish’s life with morbid curiosity, because it seemed to suggest that these stubborn reactions might not always pay off. When unpopular opinions bring about a grand and worthwhile struggle, they are dramatic in a way that is easy to encourage and celebrate. But Weltfish was politically unpalatable in a way that wasn’t supremely transgressive, and so she paid a large price for her beliefs with few ensuing concessions. As Professor Larkin began, I necessarily considered Weltfish with this framework. 

Weltfish started teaching in the anthropology graduate program in 1936, upon invitation from Franz Boas; she herself had studied in the same program a few years earlier. She taught on a year-to-year appointment, a common arrangement which allowed the University to hold onto faculty without long-term commitment. However, given how long Weltfish was employed, the renewal of her contract was seen to be automatic. She was an active teacher, researcher, and adviser, and her department pushed for her to be promoted, better paid, and put on a permanent contract—much to the irritation of the administration. She taught anthropology, linguistics and archaeology until October 1953, when she was told that her contract would not be renewed. A week later, she appeared before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. 

Professor Larkin’s lecture makes it clear that there were two objects of particular scrutiny in Weltfish’s case: the pamphlet she co-wrote with Ruth Benedict called “The Races of Mankind” and her position as President of the Congress of American Women. “The Races of Mankind” was written to combat Nazi theories of racial superiority by arguing against biological differences in race. Because the USSR attacked racial inequality as evidence of the injustice of U.S. capitalism, anyone pursuing issues of racial equality ran the risk of being suspected as a communist. The Congress of American Women was similarly listed on the roster of subversive organizations in 1946, and three years later the House Committee on Un-American Activities declared that it was made up of “primarily a hard core of Communist Party members and a circle of close sympathizers.”

Five months after being questioned, Weltfish’s contract was terminated in a process that was almost humorously opaque. Weltfish was never officially fired because she was never officially a professor. The University claimed that the termination was unrelated to her political views, but rather due to a change in hiring policy. Out of the 30 faculty members affected, Weltfish was then singly named in the press release announcing the University’s “policy change” that lecturers would not be renewed after a certain period of time. Students and faculty were outraged by this because it hung Weltfish out to dry in public. The University’s claim completely falls apart in light of a memo from the provost, Grayson Kirk, to the president, which explained how hiring policies would shift as a means of ousting Weltfish. Kirk made it clear that the connection between Weltfish and Columbia had to be severed. He offered two paths: to dismiss Weltfish publicly, or to refuse to renew her appointment. He endorsed the second option, arguing that her direct dismissal might prompt unwanted attention both internally, from her colleagues who insisted that she was a good scholar and a capable teacher, and externally, from those who might accuse the University of taking arbitrary action for political reasons. The second route would ensure that her elimination from the faculty would not be “the subject of as violent an internal storm ... as if we were to take direct and summary action in her individual case alone.”

Some details in Weltfish’s FBI file make it abundantly clear why she was suspected. For example, in 1948 she was mentioned by name in a message from the Polish government published in the Soviet press. She is listed as having written a congratulatory message for the “thirty first anniversary of the Great Socialist revolution” in her capacity as president of the American Women’s Congress. Others are decorative in comparison. A letter addressed to the FBI in 1949 (from a confidential sender) reads: “I should also like to call to your attention a Dr. Gene Weltfish, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, New York City. She is in definite connection with the Communist Party here. The direct influence that she exerts over her students makes her doubly dangerous.” The mystery author includes no argument—only evidence of unease: “It is with greatly disturbed feelings that I write this letter.”

My considerations of political unpalatability were decisively redirected by Weltfish’s obituary in the Aug. 5, 1980 copy of the New York Times. It reads: “A funeral service will be held at the Riverside Chapel today at 10A.M.; a reception will follow at Columbia University.” Despite having been the source of severe turbulence in Weltfish’s life, after her death the University assumed a different kind of memory for her, one in which her career was not interfered with, in which new hiring policies really had nothing to do with politics. While Weltfish’s life was a testament to unwavering conviction, her memorial represents an active subversion of this—a capitulation to convenience. What makes the University’s posthumous embrace of Weltfish so difficult is that it discourages the very process of engaging with the world authentically. I thought it self-evident that it is more meaningful to react to things thoughtfully and seriously, regardless of how admired they are, than to condemn things when they are unpopular, and then turn around and endorse them when the landscape changes. Columbia’s treatment of Weltfish is in direct conflict with what I think students should be encouraged to do at university—if anything, it is an education in deterrence. 

The entire point of living—of being human—is to go through this process of engagement and self-definition, even when it’s painful or unfavored. I don’t think this is something that is limited to people. Universities run uniquely tangentially to society: a position that has the possibility to be extremely productive as long as it engages with the regular world enough that it is not alienated from practical affairs, but remains at a sufficient distance so that it is not engulfed by them. All so that cleavages in national politics can be carefully examined and understood rather than reacted to brusquely. The termination of Weltfish’s contract fused the University to national churn, in a way that could have been avoided. 

The inevitability of finding aesthetic, interpersonal, and political friction in the world doesn’t have to be demeaning. Instead it can be a thrillingly serious endeavor. I take this phrase from Pasternak, who writes in Doctor Zhivago: “Man is born to live, not to prepare for life. And life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so thrillingly serious! Why then substitute it for a childish harlequinade of immature inventions, these escapes of Chekhovian schoolboys to America?” Although there is a difference in content—in this novel Pasternak details, with stunning precision, the first years of the Bolshevik Revolution—he pertinently recognises that it’s supposed to be difficult to engage with the world, it’s supposed to be serious. To neglect this, by gently nodding one’s head in whatever direction it seems to be publicly well received, is almost to neglect personhood. In addition to the annals of academia and free speech, Weltfish’s posthumous vindication sets a bad precedent for human behavior.

By the end of Professor Larkin’s lecture, every chair in the room had been taken; some sat on the floor, others leaned against walls, heads poked in from the corridor. I sat there and—instead of the overwhelming clarity I had hoped for—I wished that I could know more about Weltifish’s private life, so that I might be able to assert that, although she was publicly persecuted and even besmirched after death, she had had a rich inner life and personal focus that was only possible because of the small ways in which she had expressed herself seriously. But Weltfish had to decide to draw the line alone. But maybe the very opacity of Weltfish’s inner life and personal motivations is the best lesson for us. Will we pursue our ideas, unpopular as they may be, with fierce independence and live the consequences? Or will we quietly and subtly modify them, adjust them to the intellectual fashions of today, even if they are not our deepest convictions? The latter is easier; it aligns with the crowd and attracts those coveted PhD slots and professorial appointments. It is our decision and ours alone, not to be informed by anyone, even by Weltfish.