Counterpunch reports
Beginning in the early 1990s, I spent about a dozen years slowly collecting, analyzing and compiling tens of thousands of FBI files detailing how dozens of American anthropologists were investigated and harassed by the FBI and various loyalty boards during the late-1940s and 50s. In most of the cases I encountered, the scholars under investigation were targeted because they were involved in unpopular (legal) political causes--the most common of which involved activist campaigns fighting for racial equality, in others they challenged gender roles, economic stratification, the unbridled militarism or other conventions of their era. Many of those investigated already stood out amongst their colleagues as individuals unwilling to go along with the polite social conventions that supported the world they were challenging.
In most of these instances, non-relevant facets of individuals' lives were collected and analyzed by the FBI, employers or local law enforcement agents, and unsubstantiated accusations were collected and used to informally blackball and persecute individual anthropologists who were engaged in political activities. The range of these collected details was bizarre and often prurient (in one case, a well known anthropologist's reported, private, onanistic habits were collected and reported by the FBI). In the several dozens of cases I analyzed in my book Threatening Anthropology, none of the FBI's exhaustive inquiries into the private affairs of anthropologists provided any proof of illegal activity directly related to these investigations; but many of the anthropologists who were the subjects of these investigations wound up losing jobs, marginalized within their discipline, or leaving the field entirely, simply because they were investigated by the FBI. In the McCarthy years, the mere investigation by the FBI as a suspected communist was enough to ruin one's career, and the FBI's practice of keeping their files and findings private lent a twisted sense of legitimacy to shadowy accusations and rumors of wrong doing--yet, when I had over a dozen linear feet of these files released under the Freedom of Information Act, I found that the FBI actually had nothing of substance.
As it was in other academic fields, anthropology's weak disciplinary defensive response allowed the FBI and wider-facets of McCarthyism to flourish and wreck havoc on many of the field's best and brightest. There was an emerging silence that took over the American Anthropological Association's leadership and spread throughout the membership. Everyone got scared when the FBI investigated anthropologists in the late-1940s and 1950s, and, as the fear spread, everyone went silent. Sometimes the psychological anguish and reactions of those being persecuted made it easy for colleagues to rationalize abandoning friends. Just being investigated was enough to ruin careers and alienate individuals from other scholars--and, more generally, to teach the discipline not to study or engage in advocacy relating to controversial topics like racial inequality, poverty, segregation, and economic inequality. At a time when they were most needed, the professional associations went silent.
The relevance of this mid-century history takes on new meanings as Janice Harper, formerly of the University of Tennessee Knoxville's (UTK) Department of Anthropology has found herself subjected to a bizarre and Kafkaesque investigation of the sort which cannot hope to produce anything resembling a positive outcome for the subject, regardless of the findings of the investigation: indeed, this investigation's impact on Dr. Harper's reputation seems to be an outcome structurally connecting these events with investigations of the McCarthy period. As it was during the McCarthy period, just being investigated is enough to undermine one's career, and as reported by Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education this past week, Dr. Harper has now been fired by the University of Tennessee.
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