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...of its message. As librarians strengthened their commitment to intellectual freedom, libraries throughout the United States and abroad hosted the Bicentennial Panel Exhibit documenting with quotations and illustrations the worldwide quest for knowledge. Using books, film, recordings, and discussion groups on the bicentennial theme, libraries at the height of the Cold War demonstrated their role in providing free access to information.
INTRODUCTION
Celebrating its bicentennial in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, Columbia University put the role of free information in a free society at the center of its 200th anniversary celebration. Downplaying the usual self-congratulation, Columbia's trustees and its president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, adopted as the bicentennial theme "Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof." Combining institutional observance and media blitz, high culture and Madison Avenue, the year-long program evolved from a campus observance to an international focus on free expression in academic and civic life. Planned during the darkest days of McCarthyism, the bicentennial promoted an ideal of free information starkly at odds with the times. Although not part of the initial vision for the bicentennial, libraries were essential to its success, emblematic of its values, and agents of its message. Through their participation in the bicentennial, librarians affirmed their own commitment to intellectual freedom.
Planning began in 1946 in the immediate postwar period. Following the bicentennials of Princeton and Penn and the tercentenary of Harvard, (1) Columbia sought to put its own mark on the ritual occasion. Its location in New York, world publishing capital and headquarters of the United Nations, gave Columbia its unique identity. Arthur Sulzberger, Columbia graduate and publisher of the New York Times, suggested to his fellow university trustees that Columbia build its bicentennial around a universal theme, "Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof" (Black, 1954). The basic outline of the celebration was sketched by a committee of faculty and alumni (on which neither the university library nor Columbia's School of Library Service was represented). In the bleak aftermath of World War II, the committee preferred a somber, reflective observance to an unabashedly celebratory one. It proposed a full year of events, scholarly convocations that promoted dialogue, the involvement of institutions worldwide, and the use of radio and television to expand the reach of the bicentennial. Like Sulzberger, they favored an overarching idea to connect all the varied activities. Unaware of his suggestion, they proposed the theme "The Education of Free Men in the Service of Man."
Named president of Columbia University in 1947, Dwight D. Eisenhower did not alter this broad outline. On the advice of a committee of trustees, he appointed Arthur Sulzberger to chair the Bicentennial Central Committee and in late 1949 approved the adoption of Sulzberger's original theme, "Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof," thus extending the focus beyond academic freedom. Soon to take leave from Columbia for a NATO assignment in Europe, in May 1950 Eisenhower issued an invitation to 1,080 universities, museums, and libraries around the world to join the observance of Columbia's bicentennial, in whatever way they felt appropriate, and to reaffirm their faith in the freedom of inquiry and expression (Columbia's bicentennial, 1956, p. 6). To dramatize the theme, he asked universities in the Soviet Union and others behind the Iron Curtain to participate.
COLUMBIA ON COMMUNISM
As the Columbia Bicentennial Committee and public relations staff developed the celebration's theme, planned events, and invited speakers, university officials grappled with the possible presence of communists in their academic ranks. Conceived in the early days of the Cold War, the bicentennial theme initially distinguished between freedom in the Western democracies and suppression and thought control in the Soviet Bloc. As the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated subversion at home, the theme took on domestic significance. Columbia officials sought to articulate whether communist professors were entitled to academic freedom. After Eisenhower was elected president of the United States in 1952, Grayson Kirk, his successor at Columbia, made clear that adherence to communist dogma was incompatible with the spirit of inquiry and open-mindedness required by the academic community. At the same time, Kirk believed that universities should protect "the 'honest scholar' whose ideas did not coincide with those dominating public opinion at the moment." (2) Kirk thus assumed the position taken by many universities, defining communists in terms of behavior and attitude that excluded them from the protection of the First Amendment. According to Ellen Schrecker, Columbia's "relatively liberal administration" generally avoided virulent anticommunism, engaging in rather sophisticated subterfuge to rid itself of one left-leaning lecturer and tolerating former communists who were tenured (Schrecker, 1986, pp. 255-58). (3) On February 15, 1953, the same day Columbia formally announced its bicentennial plans, (4) Arthur Sulzberger wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine asking, "Have we the courage to be free?" He stated that he would not knowingly hire communists at the Times, but, in contrast to Senator Joseph McCarthy, would not seek to expose them. (5)
Indeed, the bicentennial celebration reflected a distinctly corporate capitalism. Board member Thomas Watson, president of IBM, had actively recruited Eisenhower for the Columbia presidency. In 1949 Douglas Black, president of Doubleday, Columbia trustee, and publisher of Dwight Eisenhower's bestseller, Crusade in Europe, joined the Bicentennial Central Committee. Frederick E. Hasler, a director of the Chemical Bank and Trust and former president of the New York State Chamber of Commerce, was hired to direct the fundraising associated with the campaign. (6) With businessmen and PR staff aboard and Sulzberger at the helm, the bicentennial ship sailed from the sheltered cove of academia onto the high seas of marketing and mass communication. Named executive director of Columbia's new Office of Development in...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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