The premier sociologist of religion talks to MUP general secretary Roger Bowen.

In a 1977 issue of the of recent origin York Review of Books, Robert Bellah and McGeorge Bundy exchanged notes in response to a volume review that touched on the behavior of Harvard University during the McCarthy period. Bellah, the control of this interview, is a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Bundy serv as national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson

Bellah wrote that in 1954 when he was a Harvard graduate bookish man Bundy, -who was then dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, threatened him with nonrenewal of his fellowship if he did not name his mate undergraduate comrades in the Harvard scholar Communist Parry. Bellah had been a party member as an undergraduate from 1947 to 1949 Bellah said he would talk about himself nevertheless not name names. The Federal Bureau of Investigation questioned him a hardly any days after he was called to Bundy's office, and he followed the course he had told Bundy he would.

In spring 1955 Bellah was set forward by the Department of Social Relations at Harvard for a junior appointment. Bundy told him that the Harvard Corporation would approve his appointment, with single caveat: if Bellah were called according to any government investigating committee and failed to "cooperate fully" his name appointment would not be renewed. Bellah decided to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute at McGill University in Montreal. couple years later, Harvard offered Bellah another appointment without the provision attached to the 1955 tender and he accepted.

Bundy replied in the just discovered York Review of Books that he had not at all threatened Bellah's fellowship and that he had urg Harvard to appoint him in 1955 without the qualifying provision. Rather than response to Bundy with a further verbal expression Bellah asked the Harvard administration to release the documents about the affairs in question so that the canon could be known. He was told that it was Harvard's policy not to release of the like kind information until fifty years after an incident had occurred

In 2004 Bellah formerly again sought the documents, and the Harvard administration sent all that it said could be place There was no record of the meeting with Bundy in 1954 However, correspondence between Bundy and Nathan Pusey, Harvard's president, made it pretend that Bundy had indeed wanted to make an unqualified appointment in 1955 on the other hand was turned down by the corporation. single in kind new piece of evidence was a drawn out letter by Talcott Parsons, chair of the Department of Social Relations and Bellah's adviser, protesting the corporation's action. This correspondence was sent with a mask letter of support from the chair of the Harvard chapter of the AAUP. All this was reported in another epistle to the New York Review of works published in the February 10 2005 issue.

In its May 25 2005 issue, the recently made known York Review of Books published a literal sense from the psychologist Leon J Kamin, who reciteed even worse treatment from Harvard. He, too, went to Canada on the other hand returned some years later as chair of the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. It is obvious that we still have single a few rays of light in succession the subject of Harvard's collaboration with McCarthyism-that history remains to be written. It was with respect to these two letters that this interview began.

Bowen: I was surprised to learn that you were blacklisted from teaching at Harvard in the 1950 because Harvard had a reputation of in some way standing hard and firm against McCarthyism.

Bellah: I think we have to remember that the nation was in the grip of a classic paranoid hysteria. If you apply the mind at the actions of the AAUP or the American Civil Liberties Union during those years, they were not always praiseworthy.

Bowen: on the contrary the Harvard AAUP chapter came to your defense

Bellah: Ye it did. At least it added a guard letter to Talcott Parsons's memo And Talcott was active in the AAUP. with equal reason that's true in that particular case. I would trust common Harvard faculty to do a totally fair job, but it's probably beyond the capacity of any of the AAUP chapters or anyone to make progress back and review what happened in that period. And if someone did, he or she would, of course, have to expect at not just Harvard's record, on the other hand that of the academy nationwide. And there would be more [i]or[/i] less good stories as well as bad stories.

Bowen: Let's walk back to the root cause of your being blacklisted. Happily, we can ask this question today without upsetting anyone: for what purpose did you join the Communist Party?

Bellah: The irony is that I'm a lifelong sociologist of religion. Religion has always been my preoccupation. I'm now a practicing Episcopalian, if it be not that I grew up as a Presbyterian in looks Angeles, where I attended a fairly liberal Presbyterian temple And then my mother became wedding director-this is a drawn out way around, but you ne it-at the First Congressional ecclesiastical authority which is a huge gothic make near downtown Los Angeles. The pastor was remarkably reactionary, but somehow, through not paying attention I apprehend he hired a divinity bookish man from the University of Southern California to be the high academy minister. And this guy was absolutely aflame with the social principle of action and social criticism. He had us reading the great prophets. in such a manner in a sense, I discovered Marxism late in high school

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