President Harry Gideonse
Harry Baron
— I used to see him on the subway going home. He’d be sitting there and not acknowledging a soul of all these Brooklyn students. It wasn’t that crowded. But I know, nowadays — the current president, for example, I see him walking around the campus talking to people. What a civilized thing! Gideonse was a very traditional scholar, let’s say, and that was his way.
Bill Taylor
— What I had heard at the time was that Gideonse had been brought to Brooklyn College by the Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, having served with Robert Hutchins, the boy wonder out at the University of Chicago, with something of a mission to clean up the reputation of Brooklyn College, you know, and he proceeded to do that by labeling a lot of people as Communists or Communist sympathizers. And I don't think he really served the mission very well because he was promoting the idea that there were a lot of Communists at the college, and I think that simply wasn't true.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— The college administration was trying overcome the humble beginnings of Brooklyn College. It had started in an office building in the 1930s. It didn't have a campus. The campus was a triumph. I think we probably were too young to appreciate at that time how much of a triumph it was. The administration was trying to build Brooklyn College into a premier institution in the country, having a start with the great academic merit of the kids and the faculty, but wanting to go on to establish its reputation. And along comes this motley crew of leftists who don't have any concern about that at all, and who are simply busy, in the eyes of the administration, tearing down the reputation of the university, giving it a reputation for being extreme and left and unmanaged and unmanageable. And it set off a tug of war, a battle between the college administration and those of us who were activists, that went on for all of the time that I was there.
Al Lasher
— So Brooklyn College was in trouble and they decided that they had to get a president of the college who was above reproach politically, and he had to be a great scholar and he had to have all the qualifications of the president of a college and there was a guy named Harry Gideonse, who was the chairman of the History Department at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago was, and still is, one of the great universities in the world. At that time its reputation was exceedingly high. And Harry Gideonse was a wunderkind. At twenty-eight years old he became chairman of the History Department of the University of Chicago.
Harry Baron
— He was a very impressive guy. He was a scholar. You know, you were impressed, he was eloquent. He spoke beautifully. And he had the voice to go with it, he had the bearing. I took a course, just to see what he was like. Because, you know, I had some regard for the guy, but I said,"What makes this guy tick? What's he really think?" And of course, a lot of it was over my head.
Bill Taylor
— I found it a somewhat interesting course, but he was as authoritarian in the classroom as he was elsewhere.
Harry Baron
— Norman Geld, who was on the staff of Vanguard, took the course too. And he would get up and really give Gideonse a back and forth. He'd argue with him good. And I used to have more fun watching. Gideonse, of course he took it. He almost invited it. I mean, see, that's where he was a good educator in that he liked the give and take. But he would disagree with you all the way and he would really cut you down to size because he was Gideonse and you weren't.
Harry Baron
— But he was out of his element. I don't think he realized what he was getting into, maybe. That's my guess — when he comes onto a campus with all these children of immigrants, he wasn't used to this. These were Brooklyn kids who were bright and sassy, and they grew up believing in the Constitution. "Free speech. You can't stop me!" And it's true, they had nothing to lose.
Herb Dorfman
— We came out of the War and the Soviet Union was our partner, and suddenly the Soviet Union was possibly an enemy, and he hopped right on that bandwagon. And so he wanted nothing that would give them any solace, and, you know, he believed there were cells everywhere, and that Communists were ready to take over the government, this sort of thing. I don't know what he believed, but that was the atmosphere then. And he would not be accused of being any less disciplined, persevering with regard to any left-wing influence than anybody else. I mean, Joe McCarthy would not outdo him.
Bill Taylor
— I think the Korean War was the precipitating event for a lot of these actions by Gideonse to suppress speech and association on campus. I think most people didn't feel a call to arms. I mean, I like to think that if I were of age during World War II that I might have volunteered and not waited to be drafted. But for the Korean War, even though I, you know, recognized the Soviet Union as a threat, I didn't perceive our interests as being at stake. And I think many people felt the same way.
Gene Bluestein
— We always offered Gideonse a chance to have space in the paper but he never took it. Instead, he had a bulletin board and he’d put our articles on the bulletin board and say nasty things about them.
Harry Baron
— He had a bulletin board in the lobby in Boylan Hall and he stuck up his version of things on the bulletin board. He didn't know how to handle students. He didn't know how to put them on. He didn't know how to spin them. He was not a really good diplomat. He could have called them in and, you know, stroked them and said, "That's okay. I'll give you this."
Herb Dorfman
— Politically I don't know where he stood. I mean, he might have voted Democratic for all I know. But he had this notion that people shouldn't be allowed to operate who had different ideas about what America should be like. He didn't like Socialist thinking with regard to the American model.
Herb Dorfman
— And he was known as a liberal and an anti-Communist. Right? He was a Fascist, the worst kind of Fascist. What's the worst kind of Fascist? A hidden Fascist. You don't know that's who he is. You can't see it.
Ann Lane
— He was what separated me — and I don't know how many others on the Vanguard staff — from believing liberals were good people. Because he was a liberal. He was, indeed, the classic liberal. He was a good liberal.
Harry Baron
— We used to call him Harry Gideonse, the nineteenth century liberal, which he wasn't. I mean, he wasn't a liberal. He was rather conservative.
Bill Taylor
— I think he had an authoritarian personality.
Gene Bluestein
— Gideonse was a fascist, absolutely.
Ann Lane
— He was the enemy. Always he was the enemy.
Bill Taylor
— He called us, at one point, midget Malachs, I think. Do you know who Malach was? Malach was the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations. So that was his orientation.
Bill Taylor
— He was against unions. He was fighting union organizing on the campus.
Herb Dorfman
— Now, I think most of the faculty, the influential faculty, thought the way we did, but he was a bully. You know? He was a bully and they wanted their jobs. This was not a time to be losing a job. Many of them were trying to get tenure. And even those with tenure could be pushed around. Clarkson had tenure. That didn't prevent Gideonse from throwing him out of the chairmanship. That's the way he was.