Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

96 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:89
wearing sandwich boards calling on students and professors to support their
organizing campaign picketed at Columbia’s main gate while Butler delivered
his address. 18
The Columbia administration expelled Burke at the end of his sophomore
year, after he refused to apologize for leading a student demonstration
in front of President Butler’s mansion to protest Columbia’s decision to
send a delegate to Nazi Germany for the University of Heidelberg’s 550th
anniversary celebration, along with friendly greetings. The Heidelberg celebration
was a major Nazi propaganda festival, carefully orchestrated by
Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. Goebbels himself delivered the
welcoming address at the banquet for foreign delegates. The four-day festival
was scheduled to culminate on June 30, the anniversary of the Night of
the Long Knives, a sacred day on the Nazi calendar. The University of
Heidelberg, which had expelled its Jewish faculty members, had been the
site of a massive book burning of Jewish and other “un-German” books in
May 1933. The books the Nazis burned included the works of one of
Columbia’s own professors, Franz Boas, considered the world’s most distinguished
anthropologist, and a Jew.
Over twenty American colleges and universities accepted the Nazis’
invitation to send delegates to Heidelberg, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia,
Vassar, Michigan, and Cornell. The Hitler regime believed that the
presence at Heidelberg of academic dignitaries from the United States and
other democratic nations would cause people in the West to view Nazi Germany
as a respectable member of the community of nations while it intensified
its persecution of Jews and built up its armed forces. 19
When, on February 28, 1936, Columbia announced its acceptance of
Heidelberg’s invitation, the administration was “bombarded” 20 with protests
from Jewish leaders and organizations, the Columbia Spectator, and
18. New York World-Telegram, September 24, 1936, roll 128, American Civil
Liberties Union [hereafter, ACLU] Papers, microfilm edition. The day after Butler’s
welcoming address, some of Columbia’s striking building service workers
picketed against the administration’s refusal to employ union exterminators. New
York World-Telegram, September 25, 1936; Columbia Spectator, September 30,
1936.
Herbert Hawkes, the Columbia College dean who expelled Robert Burke, held
strong anti-labor views. In 1920, Hawkes recruited Columbia students to serve as
strikebreakers when railroad workers walked off the job in the East. Stephen H.
Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 31.
19. On the University of Heidelberg’s 550th anniversary celebration, see Norwood,
The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 60-68, 93-97, 125, 158, 166.
20. Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, 93.