Page 2: Freethinkers, Heretics, & the Little Blue Books

They unanimously agreed to hire him. He accepted their invitation.

The nineteen board members in attendance (of a total of twenty-two members) agreed to appoint one of the world’s most eminent philosophers to a position at their college. The appointment would be for seventeen months and would begin in one year. Two senior faculty members were retiring. Replacing one with a revered scholar, a living legend, must have felt like an easy decision.

“I know that your acceptance of this appointment will add luster to the name and achievement of the department,” wrote Ordway Tead, chairman of the board, “and that it will deepen and extend the interest of the college in the philosophic basis of human living.”

When he accepted the new appointment, Bertrand Russell was teaching at the University of California. The fall before he was to join the City College of New York’s philosophy department, he was scheduled to give the William James Lectures at Harvard University. At the City College of New York, he was only scheduled to teach three courses: one on the philosophical foundations of mathematics; a second on the relationship between logic to science, mathematics, and philosophy; and a third on the “relations of pure to applied sciences and the reciprocal influence of metaphysics and scientific theories.”

At 67 years of age, though Russell’s research career in mathematical philosophy was well behind him and had arguably reached its zenith in the first two decades of the century with the publication of The Principles of Mathematics in 1903, and later the co-writing of the three volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913) with Alfred North Whitehead, there was probably no one more qualified in the world to fulfill this teaching assignment at CCNY.

Yet within days of his appointment, a chorus of public opposition formed—one that had not been seen in American higher education and which to this day remains unequalled.

Bishop Manning of the Protestant Episcopal Church wrote a letter to the New York newspapers denouncing Russell’s appointment. “What is to be said of colleges and universities which hold up before our youth as a responsible teacher of philosophy,” wrote the Bishop, “a man who is a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality, and who specifically defends adultery?”

“Can anyone who cares for the welfare of our country,” he added, “be willing to see such teaching disseminated with the countenance of our colleges and universities?”

Others soon joined the bandwagon of vilification and moral outrage at his appointment. Russell was described variously as a “professor of paganism” and “the philosophical anarchist and moral nihilist of Great Britain,” whose appointment to a position at CCNY was a “brutal, insulting shock to old New Yorkers and all real Americans.”

The Borough President of Queens, George V. Harvey went so far as to say that if the college did not annul the appointment, he would move to eliminate the entire appropriation allotted to the upkeep of the New York City municipal colleges, which in 1941 amounted to 7.5 million dollars. Harvey announced that “the colleges would either be godly colleges, American colleges, or they would be closed.”

When the Board failed, in spite of increasing public pressure, to annul Russell’s appointment to City College, a taxpayer’s suit was filed with the New York Supreme Court on the grounds that he was an alien and an advocate of sexual immorality. Mrs. Jean Kay of Brooklyn filed the suit on behalf of her daughter, Gloria. She feared what might happen to her daughter if she took one of Russell’s courses at City College—even though at the time only men could take day-session courses in the liberal arts at City College.

Her lawyer, Joseph Goldstein, described Russell’s works in his brief as “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber.” He also said that Russell “conducted a nudist colony in England. His children paraded nude. He and his wife have paraded nude in public. This man who is now about seventy has gone in...