Ray Ginger - Academic Career and Blacklisting

Academic Career and Blacklisting

After earning a Western Reserve Ph.D. in 1951 by the unusual expedient of presenting his published biography as a dissertation, Ginger took up a post at Harvard Business School as editor of the Business History Review, with a little teaching on the side. Besides his editorial duties, he wrote numerous scholarly articles in economics, labor history, and business history while at Harvard, researched a projected biography of Clarence Darrow, and enjoyed every prospect for a distinguished academic career.

The witchhunts of the McCarthy Era put an abrupt halt to this promising future. When it seemed probable that both Ginger and his wife might be subpoenaed by the Massachusetts equivalent of the infamous House Committee on Unamerican Activities, university officials demanded (on June 16, 1954) that he sign an oath declaring that he was not a member of the Communist Party, and that his wife (who had no university connection) sign a similar oath. Instant dismissal despite a recent three-year contract was the threatened alternative. When Ginger instead chose to resign, Harvard insisted that he leave the state immediately as a condition of receiving the two weeks of salary remaining on his existing contract.

Ginger, his pregnant wife, and their small son went to New York on two days notice to stay with relatives they had never met. Ann Ginger gave birth as a charity patient, and the marriage came to a rancorous halt not long thereafter. Ginger worked in New York for the next six years, first in advertising and then as an editor at the book publishers Alfred Knopf and Henry Holt, but neither his success in these endeavors, his remarriage in 1956, nor the publication of two notably readable works of history (Altgeld's America and Six Days or Forever?) fully compensated for his bitterness at having been ejected from the academic world and then apparently blacklisted.