The Rand School of Social Science
A Biographical
Dictionary of the Left
by
Francis X. Gannon
Background information by
researcher, Susan O'Donnell:
A few weeks ago I wrote about the communist
books I had found at the recycling center. Most had a Tamiment
Library, New York University stamp inside them, and a few (older ones)
had Rand School of Social Science stamps.
I recently ordered "A Biographical
Dictionary of the Left," by Francis X. Gannon. I had found one small
book that said it was a preview issue, published in 1968, and that the
plans were for many more issues. I checked online and found that there
were four volumes published, the last in 1973. They were by Western
Islands. They are great, with lots of revealing details about individual
and groups.
Last night I was browsing through Volume IV and found an entry for Rand
School. It has info as in Fabian Freeway (connection with
British [Socialist] Fabians, ties with Intercollegiate
Socialist Society, later League for Industrial Democracy, etc.)
It says this, which explains the source of my communist books:
"By 1924, the Rand School boasted of a library
with more than 6,000 bound volumes..."
"In 1921...in imitation of the British
Fabian Socialists, the Rand School opened a summer school at Camp
Tamiment in the beautiful Pennsylvania Pocono Mountain area near the
Delaware Water Gap... under the auspices of a harmless sounding organization
called The Tamiment Institute and Library [there were many
socialist/communist speakers and discussion groups held in a building at 7
East 15th Street in New York City].
"In brochure we learn that 'The Tamiment
Institute and Library is a private nonprofit and non-partisan institution
sponsored by the People's Educational Camp Society of Tamiment,
Pennsylvania.' However, under the heading of 'Advisory Committee' we read
the names of Norman Thomas, socialist leader, Reinhold Niebuhr, socialist
theologian, Daniel Bell, socialist leader, Sidney Hook, former communist and
now in the socialist camp (Fabian,) George N. Shuster, president of Hunter
College, New York City, with a record of leftist associations, and J. Robert
Oppenheimer (who was dropped by the Atomic Energy Commission because of
doubts raised, as a security risk.)
"The building which now houses the Tamiment
Institute is the same that was purchased many years ago for the Rand
School of Social Science. The Rand School of Social Science,
founded by the American Socialist Society, eventually ran out of endowed
funds and reorganized itself under this new name. The Rand School label had
already been thoroughly discredited and hence became unsuitable for cover."
"In the hot weather the meetings moved to a
luxurious socialistic camp in the mountains of Pennsylvania where the
proceedings are conducted in cooler surroundings of natural splendor. There
we find a hall called the Morris Hillquit Memorial Library of the
Tamiment Cultural Center, Tamiment, Pennsylvania. The late Morris
Hillquit was the head of the Socialist Party in the 1920s and also a
participant in the League for Industrial Democracy and the Rand
School of Social Science. He had been a militant defender of the
Bolshevik Revolution and a vociferous supporter of the Communist
International."
"Thus the Tamiment Institute and Library
is a new name for the old Rand School of Social Science and it
has replaced the latter as an adjunct of L.I.D. It is the American
counterpart of the British Fabian Research Bureau. The Fabian
organization and its American twin feed organized packages of information to
leftists in all walks of life, to undermine our system of free enterprise
and individual freedom."
"In 1963 the Tamiment Library of radical
literature became a part of the New York University Libraries system.
The Tamiment Institute currently describes itself in far less inflammatory
language than in earlier years. Now it is 'an adult educational institution
devoted to the furthering of a better understanding of the political,
social, and economic complexities of contemporary society.'"
It's a great thing to have something you've
been wondering about addressed so completely!
A couple of comments I'd make:
1) I tended to think of Fabian socialism as
less hardcore as communism, but the collection of books shows no
distinction since the collection had Stalin, Lenin, Engels, Marx,
Browder, Foster, etc. and
2) I was reminded when looking at the books,
of Whittaker Chambers' description of communists as being dirty and
unkempt. I've never seen such a grubby bunch of books! They were really
dirty. I washed the covers of the ones that were waterproof but had to
leave many alone since the color washes off the covers of many old
books.
Links to more information:
School Violence Prevalence,
Fears, and Prevention
:
What is Tamiment:
Founded in 1921 as the People's Educational Camp Society, Tamiment
was conceived as a 20th Century version Chatauguas. Child of the Rand
School of Social Science, it began a program of sports and meetings,
built as an assembly hall in 1922 at the heart of the property.
Distinguished thinkers from major colleges here and abroad visited
Tamiment, for three days or three weeks, to lead discussions. The gifted
guests, including Columbia University professors and Curtis Institute
of Philadelphia musicians, and such giants as Will Durant, staged their own
theatrical experiments.
By the 1930's Tamiment
was notable not only for its summer guest list, but for a series of
extraordinary spring conferences on contemporary problems which far preceded
the more expensive and arcane Aspen and Arden. One such conference
gathered Deans of most Ivy League colleges to plot the course of higher
education in the United States. Appropriate to such conferences, is
Tamiment's had a small and excellent library, which offered individual
escape to contemplate or small group meeting space. This library is today
housed at New York University, known as the Tamiment Library.
The first Tamiment guests
staged their own theatricals. In the earlier period, however, Tamiment began
to lure talented unknowns to run their productions. Among them were such
soon-to-be stars of the yet TV media as Imogene Coca, Carol Burnett, Woody
Allen, Shelley Berman and Joe Bishop. Thus, the many pictures of these stars
grace our halls. Danny Kaye was a Tamiment "star"-ter, long before "Lady In
The Dark" made him a luminary.
The Tamiment Library:
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York
University form a unique, internationally-known center for scholarly
research on Labor and the Left. The primary focus is the complex
relationship between trade unionism and progressive politics and how this
evolved over time. ...
Tamiment has one of the finest
research collections in the country documenting the history of radical
politics: socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the cultural
left, the New Left, and the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.
Alger Hiss Innocent,
Anticommunists Declare!
Among those who thought Hiss was guilty even at the time was a clutch of
liberal anticommunists affiliated with the Tamiment Institute and the
publication it funded, The New Leader. The Tamiment Institute had
grown up around the Rand School, a socialist school in New
York founded early in the century, and both the institute and The New
Leader were home to people who believed in socialism but were fervently
opposed to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. Sol Levitas, for
example, who was editor of The New Leader for several decades, was a Russian
emigrant and Menshevik who was bitterly opposed to Bolshevism. During the
1950s, the New Leader, like several other organs of the anticommunist left,
accepted some funding from the Central Intelligence Agency. These were not
Hiss' kind of people.
It was therefore a
matter of no small annoyance to Mitchel Levitas--son of Sol, former editor
of the New York Times Book Review and the Times op-ed page, and a board
member of the Tamiment Institute--when he learned that the Tamiment Library
at NYU (to whom the Tamiment Institute three decades ago gave the
now-defunct Rand School's archival material on radical movements in America,
and tens of thousands of dollars in financial support) would herald spring's
arrival with a March 21 launch party for NYU's pro-Hiss Web site."
Bulletin of the Tamiment
Institute: For half a
century, Max Shachtman was at the center of U.S. and international
controversies. In the early Twenties, at the age of nineteen, Shachtman was
the talented leader of the youth section of the early Communist movement.
A decade later, he became one of the three principal founders of the
American Trotskyist movement. In the late Thirties, he led a large
minority section of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, breaking
with Trotsky and the majority leadership on the "Russian Question" and the "defensist"
position on the USSR, then forming in 1940 the Workers Party, later called
the Independent Socialist League. More than fifteen years later, the
ISL - often called "Schachtmanite" for its distinctive view of Russia as
a new social form, a bureaucratic collectivist society - dissolved
into the Socialist Party, which it saw as the bearer of democratic socialist
traditions closest to its views. From this platform, during the Sixties,
Shachtman, among other things, continued the struggle against Stalinism in
favor of the democratic process and interests of the American labor
movement....
Max Shachtman first
learned of the Young People's Socialist League from Dr. Abraham
Lefkowitz, his instructor at Dewitt Clinton High School and a leader of
one of the first teacher's unions in the City. In 1919, Shachtman
frequented the Rand School Bookstore, a radical center, where he
obtained socialist literature. ...
In 1922, Shachtman met
Martin Abern, the National Secretary of the Young Workers League, who
had just returned from Moscow, where he had been a delegate to the
Fourth Congress of the Communist International. Recognizing a brilliance
in Shachtman, Abern persuaded him to move to Chicago, the national
headquarters of the youth organization, to take over editorship of its
official magazine, The Young Worker....
In 1925, he was sent to
Moscow to attend, the Fifth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the
Communist International, and two years later was sent to the Seventh
Plenum of the Comintern and the Young Communist International, During
this period, he became a national figure in the Party and one of its most
promising young leaders...
Beginning in 1934,
Shachtman edited The New International, a monthly journal
which had a significant world-wide circulation and was distinguished
by contributions from such luminaries as John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Max
Eastman, Victor Serge, Dwight MacDonald, Earl Birney, Alfred Rosmer, and
Bertram Wolfe. It was noted for the high quality of its political studies
and polemics, and its printing of classic documents from socialist
archives...
The events which
followed the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 split the Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party down the middle, with Shachtman as principal spokesman for
the minority. The minority - 45% of the party and the youth - opposed the
traditional Trotskyist defense of the Soviet Union on the grounds that the
acts of Stalin's Russia - the partition of Poland and the invasion of the
Baltic states and Finland - did not differ from the imperialism of the great
capitalist powers....
Shachtman continued to
edit The New International for a brief time, but his main role
during the Second World War and through most of the Fifties was that of a
political leader and spokesman of the Workers Party and its successor
after 1948, the Independent Socialist League.... Among his frequent
speaking engagements on behalf of the WP and ISL, some of the most
significant were the debates with Earl Browder, deposed General Secretary
of the Communist Party of the U.S.; with Father Rice, labor priest in
Pittsburgh, on social struggles in the U.S.; with Alexander Kerensky,
head of the Provisional Government during the Russian Revolution of
February, 1917, on events associated with the struggle for power; and with
Friedrich Von Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, on
socialist goals....
Shachtman and his
comrades concentrated their main political propaganda on the defense of
democracy against all exploitative and oppressive regimes, whether
right wing or Stalinist. In 1958, Shachtman and his colleagues of the
ISL, on behalf of the organizations affiliated and in consonance with
these views, challenged their inclusion on the Attorney General's
"Subversive List" and succeeded in having them removed from the list. Max
Shachtman was the principal witness for the organizations in the protracted
hearings in Washington D.C. Thereafter, the ISL and its youth section
dissolved into the Socialist Party, now Social Democrats, USA.
Struggling over politics and
culture- Continued from page 2:
Caught in the revolutionary passions unleashed by the Russian Revolution,
Novik became politically active, writing articles for socialist newspapers
and magazines. He spent summers at Camp Tamiment, the socialist
Rand School's summer camp and school for workers. ....
Novik continued his
studies at the New School for Social Research. As chair of the
Young People's Socialist League during the 1920s, Novik agitated for
socialist education in the city's public high schools....
In addition to political
agitation, Novik participated in a number of the Young People's Socialist
League's educational and social functions.....
During the 1920s Novik
served as social director of the ILGWU's Unity House and, by the end of the
decade, the head of the Discussion Guild. In the latter role, Novik arranged
for public lectures and debates in Carnegie Hall and similar venues.
"We attracted large audiences," Novik recalled, "because we debated (the
crucial) issues of the day." It also helped that Novik secured the
participation of intellectual and progressive luminaries such as author
Will Durant, philosophers Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, and
attorney Clarence Darrow.
Alger Hiss Innocent,
Anticommunists Declare!:
"New York University has just launched a Web site dedicated to the
proposition that the late Alger Hiss was innocent. Hiss, you'll recall, was
the former State Department official who in 1948 was accused by Whittaker
Chambers, a former Communist agent, of spying for the Soviet Union. ...
Among those who thought Hiss
was guilty even at the time was a clutch of liberal anticommunists
affiliated with the Tamiment Institute and the publication it funded,
The New Leader. The Tamiment Institute had grown up around the Rand
School, a socialist school in New York founded early in the century, and
both the institute and The New Leader were home to people
who believed in socialism but were fervently opposed to the Soviet Union and
the Communist Party. Sol Levitas, for example, who was editor of The New
Leader for several decades, was a Russian emigrant and Menshevik who
was bitterly opposed to Bolshevism. During the 1950s, the New Leader,
like several other organs of the anticommunist left, accepted some funding
from the Central Intelligence Agency. These were not Hiss' kind of people.
RAND's history: "RAND
celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1998. It was on May 14, 1948, that
Project RAND--an outgrowth of World War II--separated from the Douglas
Aircraft Company of Santa Monica, California, and became an independent,
nonprofit organization. The new entity was dedicated to furthering and
promoting scientific, educational, and charitable purposes for the public
welfare and security of the United States....
By the 1960s, RAND was bringing its trademark mode of empirical,
nonpartisan, independent analysis to the study of urgent domestic social and
economic problems as well...
At RAND, scientists and engineers, social scientists from many
specialties, humanists, and members of the professions all pull together to
address the problems and concerns of people around the world and across the
street....
...as the war drew to a close, it became apparent that complete and
permanent peace might not be assured. There were discussions among people in
the War Department, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and
industry who saw a need for a private organization to connect military
planning with research and development decisions. In a report to the
Secretary of War, Commanding General of the Army Air Force H. H. "Hap"
Arnold wrote:
"During this war the Army, Army Air Forces, and the Navy have made
unprecedented use of scientific and industrial resources. The conclusion
is inescapable that we have not yet established the balance necessary to
insure the continuance of teamwork among the military, other
government agencies, industry, and the universities. Scientific
planning must be years in advance of the actual research and development
work."
In addition to General Arnold, key players involved in the
formation of Project RAND were Edward Bowles of M.I.T., a
consultant to the Secretary of War; General Lauris Norstad, then Assistant
Chief of Air Staff, Plans; Major General Curtis LeMay; Donald Douglas,
President of Douglas Aircraft Company....
By early 1948, Project RAND had grown to 200 staff members, including
mathematicians, engineers, aerodynamicists, physicists, chemists,
economists, and psychologists. Its second annual report noted that "the
complexity of the problems, and the rapid, if uneven, advances in the
various fields call for coordination, balance, and cross-fertilization of
effort. Coming from the laboratories of industry, the seminars of
universities, and the offices of administration, the RAND staff is very
conscious of this need for teamwork."...
H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., a prominent San Francisco attorney who later
served as president and then as chairman of the board of The Ford
Foundation, was retained as legal counsel to determine the best means of
setting up an independent RAND.... On May 14, 1948, RAND was
incorporated as a nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of
California....
Theories and tools for decisionmaking under uncertainty were created, and
basic contributions were made to game theory, linear and dynamic
programming, mathematical modeling and simulation, network theory,
and cost analysis. Jardini singled out for special recognition the
methodological approach called systems analysis, whose objective
was "to provide information to military decision-makers that would sharpen
their judgment and provide the basis for more informed choices." As RAND's
agenda evolved, Jardini noted, "systems analysis served as the
methodological basis for social policy planning and analysis across such
disparate areas as urban decay, poverty, health care, education, and the
efficient operation of municipal services such as police protection and fire
fighting." To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable
purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of
America. ....
Many of the highlights of RAND's early contributions to policymaking were
summarized in a 1996 book commemorating the 50th anniversary of Project
RAND, the predecessor of The RAND Corporation....
Today, RAND's work continues to reflect and inform the American agenda.
While one part of RAND discovers that major progress could be made in
treating depression by implementing modest, practical programs in managed
care settings, another has just offered U.S. defense leaders a strategy
for rapidly deploying ground forces. While one institute analyzes the
problem of inadequate compensation for worker injuries, another
continues long-term examination of the issues and concerns of class size
reduction in California.
The Strategist and the
Philosopher: While political correctness gave the impression of
holding the high ground, neoconservatives were making headway.
Bloom's book was a major best-seller. Within US foreign policy, a true
neoconservative school was taking shape. Networks were set up.
In the 1970s, the Democratic Senator from Washington State, Henry Jackson
(d. 1983) criticized the major treaties on nuclear disarmament. He helped
shape a generation of young lions keenly interested in strategy, in which
one comes across Richard Perle and William Kristol. The latter had
attended Allan Bloom's lectures. From within the administration and from
without, Richard Perle would meet up with Paul Wolfowitz when they
both worked for Kenneth Adelman, another contrarian of Détente policies,
or Charles Fairbanks, Under-Secretary of State.
In strategic matters, their guru was Albert Wohlstetter. A
researcher at the RAND Corporation, Pentagon advisor and a gastronomy
connoisseur nevertheless, Wohlstetter (d. 1997) was one of the fathers of
the American nuclear doctrine. More precisely, he engaged in the early
attempts to reformulate the traditional doctrine that had been the basis for
nuclear deterrence: the so-called MAD or "Mutual-Assured Destruction".
According to that theory, as both blocs had the capacity to inflict
irreparable damage onto each other, their leaders would think twice before
unleashing a nuclear attack.
For Wohlstetter and his students, MAD was both immoral--due to the
destruction it would inflict on civilian populations--and ineffective: it
would end up in a mutual neutralization of nuclear arsenals. No sane head of
state, or at any rate no American president, would decide on "reciprocal
suicide".
To the contrary, Wohlstetter proposed "staggered deterrence", i.e.
accepting limited wars that would eventually use tactical nuclear weapons
with high-precision "smart" bombs capable of striking at the enemy's
military apparatus. He criticized the joint nuclear weapons control policy
with Moscow. According to him, it amounted to bridling US technological
creativity in order to maintain an artificial balance with the USSR.
Ronald Reagan heard him out, and launched the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI), baptized "Star Wars". It is the ancestor of the
Antimissile Defense System pursued by Wohlstetter's students. They would be
the partisans warmest to the idea of a unilateral renunciation of the ABM
Treaty, which in their view prevented the US from developing other defense
systems. And they managed to convince George W. Bush.....
The neoconservatives are internationalists, partisans of a
resolute US activism in the world. Their ways do not resemble those of the
GRAND Old Republican party (Nixon, George Bush Sr.), trusting in the merits
of a Realpolitik and caring little about the nature of the regimes with
which the US was doing business to defend their interests. Someone like
Kissinger, for example, is an anti-model for them.
Yet they are not internationalists in the Wilsonian democratic
tradition (in reference to president Woodrow Wilson, the unfortunate
father of the League of Nations), that of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. The
latter are deemed naive or angelic for counting on international
institutions to spread democracy. ....
Leo Strauss was born in Kirchain, Hesse, in 1899 and left Germany
on the eve of Hitler's rise to power. After a short stint in Paris and then
in England, he left for New York where he taught at the New School for
Social Research before founding the Committee on Social Thought in
Chicago, which would become the 'Straussian' crucible....
The second thought results from his frequentation of the ancients.
What is most fundamental for them, as it is for ourselves, is the kind of
political regime that ends up shaping the character of people. Why had
the 20th century engendered two totalitarian regimes, which Strauss
preferred to call "tyrannies" in reference to Aristotle's terminology? To
this question that has not ceased provoking contemporary intellectuals,
Strauss answered: for modernity caused a rejection of moral values, of the
virtue that is the basis for democracies, and a rejection of the European
values of Reason and Civilization.
Strauss argued that this rejection had its roots in the Enlightenment.
The latter produced historicism and relativism as quasi-necessities, which
means as a refusal to admit the existence of a Higher Good reflected in
concrete, immediate and contingent goods, but irreducible to them. This Good
was an unattainable Good that is the measure for real goods.
Translated into the terms of political philosophy, the extreme
consequence of this relativism was the USA-USSR convergence theory,
very much in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s. It amounted to eventually
acknowledging a moral equivalence between American democracy and Soviet
communism. Admittedly for Leo Strauss, there exist good and bad regimes.
Political thought must not be deprived of casting value judgments. Good
regimes have the right--even duty--to defend themselves against evil ones.
It would be simplistic to immediately transpose this idea with the "axis of
Evil" denounced by George W. Bush. But it is very clear, indeed, that it
proceeds from the same source.
New School for Social Research:
private institution in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York, N.Y.
It was founded in 1919 through the efforts of scholars such as John Dewey,
Alvin Johnson, Charles Beard, and Thorstein Veblen. It began as an informal
center for adult education but started awarding bachelor's degrees in 1944
as the need for continuing education soared due to students returning to
their… //MLA style: "New School for Social Research." Britannica Student
Encyclopedia. 2003. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service. 15 Sep, 2003 .
A Partnership of Trust
: The 50th anniversary of Project AIR Force give us a unique opportunity
to reflect on past achievements and the legacy they provide for the
future.... What is it about the Rand partnership with the Air Force that
fostered productive innovation and continued relevance over so many years?
Part of the answer lies in the revolutionary concept that was the basis
for Project RAND. The founders-- General of the Army H. H. 'Hap' Arnold;
MIT's Edward Bowles; Donald Douglas, Arthur Raymond and Franklin Collbohm
from Douglas Aircraft command and others--conceived of RAND as the way for
retaining for the Air Force the considerable benefits of civilian scientific
thinking that had just been demonstrated during World War II. Their vision
is reflected in a few unlighted principles....
[Caption to photo] Donald H. Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Board of Trustees
James Davison Hunter is director of the
Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia
and author of Culture Wars.
Please read Mr. Hunter’s entire article at
http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2000spring/article1.html