As a child I thought it was up to my generation to establish world socialism. My mentors reassured me that to follow my inclination and become a scientist would not be letting the cause down, because scientists would be needed after the revolution. Between and it was even harder than usual for left-wingers in the United States to get by. If you were active on the left, or were thought to be, there were more ways then than now that you could be arrested or threatened with arrest, or have civil rights such as the right to travel abroad withdrawn.
But for would-be mathematicians, the punishment for leftism was meted out not only by government but also by university administrations. You could lose your job, or be passed over for a job; even at the student stage, you could lose a fellowship or in rarer cases be expelled from school.
We all got pretty accustomed to the danger. We used the networks we had with political allies, but we also made new contacts quickly with targets of successive attacks. In the late 40s, civil libertarians reached deep into their pockets to finance lectures on many campuses by targetted professors at the University of Washington and UC Berkeley. Why, at Harvard in I even helped organize a meeting which publicly deplored the detention incommunicado, without charges, of a mathematician way up in Canada.
And then not altogether unexpectedly some of those organizing the visits and protests became the targets in the next round. How might I do that better? I thought you were at Harvard.
Is it okay to tell people? We saw the jobs of our teachers and older friends and relatives threatened, or snatched away. In my case, my economist father and two of my grad school teachers, Wendell Furry and Dirk J. Struik, were three of those who preceded me as targets. There was a tendency to lie low politically, as you can imagine. Some of us kept stubbornly casting about for some way of keeping resistance alive. Not just defense against the Red-hunt. Organization against the Korean War, against legal lynchings of Willie McGee and other black defendants in the South, against the arms race In our memory was very fresh of a time when civilian international!
