Antisemitism without Quotas at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s and 1940s: Anticommunist Politics, the Surveillance of Jewish Students, and American Antisemitism

In May 1941, Foster M. Coffin, Director of Cornell University's Student Union, wrote to G. R. Higgins, his counterpart at the University of Minnesota, on a matter he asked to be kept "just between us": the "big problem" of Jewish boys and girls. He sought advice about managing the use of Cornell's student union by Jewish students in the six weeks of summer session, when the building became what he described as "a Jew picnic." Although the enrollment of "Hebrews" was the same in the summer as over the rest of the school-year—about fifteen percent of the student body—he estimated that "one-hundred percent" of people using the union during the summer were "Jewish boys and girls." They used the union, he wrote, like a "country club" and travelled "in packs as is their curious custom." Coffin could not identify any "specific sin" committed by these students, but complained they "do get in our hair," and worried that they brought "unregistered" friends into the union. At Minnesota, he asked Higgins, "Do you frisk them at the gate" for their credentials?²

Higgins responded to Coffin's "cry from the wilderness" about Cornell's Jewish problem with the "deepest sympathy and understanding," though he noted that Minnesota's "problem" with Jewish students occurred during the academic year, not the summer. A new student union that had opened only the year before had helped. "We still have the same Jewish use of the building," Higgins observed, "but fortunately their person is diluted with a tremendous amount of non-Jewish students." "One cannot admit any specific sin that they commit," he noted, but "in general they are objectionable."³ Neither director could identify a single, specific complaint about the Jewish students' behavior. Instead, it was their very presence that troubled the directors.

The "problem" posed by Jewish students was that they threatened to take over and intrude upon university spaces that were designated for those imagined to belong there. Jewish students did not belong because they traveled in packs and acted as though they were at a "Jew picnic." They exhibited a sense of entitlement that troubled the administrators. Perhaps most disturbing to these men was not knowing how to detect Jewish students' wrongdoing. In their deceptive sameness to other students, Jews might even bring more like themselves, and take over a student union.⁴

The University of Minnesota's discrimination against Jews demonstrates the ways in which racism and antisemitism reinforced one another. Exclusion from student unions, sororities, student government, and teaching opportunities were all part of the system that marginalized and harmed students who were deemed different and inferior, even though they were allowed to pursue undergraduate degrees. Moreover, the surveillance of Jewish student activists by anticommunist administrators reveals that there was no simple separation between town and gown, social and economic antisemitism, or national, state, and university politics.

In the same year that Coffin and Higgins bemoaned the burdensome presence of Jews in their student unions, another "cry from the wilderness" was sounded by the soon-to-retire University of Minnesota Dean of Student Affairs Edward E. Nicholson. He directed his cry of outrage to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to whom he sent the name of Esther Leah Medalie, an honors student and the first woman on the editorial board of the Minnesota Daily, because she led the anti-fascist American Student Union at the University.⁵ Medalie, a student from Minnesota's Iron Range, was Jewish, a fact lost on no one interested in the politics of leftwing students. Dean Nicholson repeatedly passed names to Hoover of students and faculty he had under surveillance for their political activism. He also sent their names to a close ally, Republican operative and former member of Congress, Ray P. Chase, who developed this information into political propaganda that falsely claimed that the University of Minnesota was a hotbed of communism. Although the activists held a range of views on issues such as entering...