"They say America First, but they mean America next."

In an effort to better understand the political context of U.S. higher education institutions in the early 1940s for the chapter I'm revising now, I turned yesterday to labor/social historian Stephen Norwood's recent The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  Norwood's book is an accessible account of the entanglements between university administrators and the Nazi regime at Harvard, Columbia, the Seven Sisters, and in German departments across the U.S.  There is much in Norwood's account which readers unfamiliar with the story of the pro-fascist leanings of much of the U.S. academic and financial elite in the 1930s will find shocking.  Harvard President James Conant and Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, were both deeply antisemitic and endeavored to build institutional relationships with the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, even as both carried out increasingly brutal actions against unionists, communists, and, in the former case, German Jewry.

Norwood ably and convincingly documents the relationship between the U.S. elite university in the 1930s and the ideological projects and diplomatic missions of the nazi state.  But 80 pages in, I feel like there are some blanks i need filled - Norwood doesn't really historicize or explain the fascist sympathies that seem to have been almost universal at Harvard and slightly less so at Columbia due in part to the larger number of Jewish students at the latter.  He doesn't really explain the class structure or the relationship to the state and/or society of any of the institutions he examines.  Though his expose is valuable for historians of higher education, I want to suggest that some gestures towards broader conclusions would have greatly enhanced his text.  So would an introduction laying out the stakes, scale, and scope of these transoceanic fascisms and their importance for U.S. politics, knowledge production, and the history of universities.

Need to cut this entry short to run to campus.