What Made Budd Talk? Budd Schulberg’s Testimony and the Implications of the House Un-American Activities Committee

Seymour “Budd” Wilson Schulberg was a screenwriter, novelist, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1936, and for three years of his life – from 1937 to 1940 – he was also a member of the Communist Party. A decade later, at the height of the McCarthy Era, he was called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities regarding his party involvement. However, unlike some others who were called before the committee, Schulberg cooperated fully with investigators, acknowledging his membership in the Communist Party and naming former associates. So how did a man involved with left-wing advocacy during his college years who eventually became a member of the Communist Party become so disillusioned with the organization that he turned on them on the biggest stage? Per his testimony, it came down to debates over his novel “What Makes Sammy Run?”

The late 1940s to mid 1950s were marked by McCarthyism: suspicion of and investigation into left-wing individuals on the belief that they were responsible for communist influence on American society, which would ultimately lead to the destruction of democracy and the spread of Soviet totalitarianism. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, the governing body that conducted such investigations, looked into the alleged subversive activities of private citizens and public employees alike. However, many considered it a political spectacle that ruined careers by public shaming rather than bringing about actual change or producing evidence of illegal activity. On May 23, 1951 Budd Schulberg was called before this committee after being cited other testimony in April of the same year.

Schulberg begins his testimony, a transcript of which is held in the Rauner Archives, by outlining how he first became involved with left-wing organizations:

“From about 1937, as I say, I was first in a study group, a Marxist study group, which, without any formality that I remember, became a Young Communist League group…I joined because at the time I felt that the political issues that they seemed to be in favor of, mostly I recall the opposition to the Nazis and Mussolini and a feeling that something should be done about it…”

He identified the man who invited him to join this group as Stanley Lawrence, the head of the Hollywood Communist Party. According to Schulberg, Lawrence originally framed the group as a broad advocacy organization “...that any man of good will, anybody opposed to Fascism, really could join.” Schulberg goes on to say that Lawrence encouraged discourse, testifying that “...it was even said that you didn’t have to believe in all of the points of the program. You could even disagree with some.” However, once the group began to transition away from its informal origin and into an official cell of the Communist Party, it became much more restrictive in the opinions it allowed.

When Schulberg began writing his first novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?”, he faced sharp backlash from his associates. Party members deemed his novel too individualistic. On suggestion from one of his comrades, Schulberg met with John Howard Lawson – a screenwriter later convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name other Hollywood Communists – for advice on how to make his novel more ‘proletarian’. But Schulberg refused to listen. He realized that if he were to ever be a writer, he had to distance himself. He “decided to leave the group, cut myself off, pay no more dues, listen to no more advice, indulge in no more political literary discussions, and to go away from the Party, from Hollywood, and try to write a book, which is what I did.” Schulberg left Hollywood for Vermont in May of 1939 and stayed until the early months of 1940 upon the completion of his novel.

Once back in Hollywood, Schulberg was approached by Richard Collins, one of his original Communist Party contacts, who told him “that they felt that my whole attitude had been sharply in opposition to the Party; that I had gone away without announcement.” Collins further suggested that Schulberg should once again consult the Party before submitting his novel to the publisher, but he again refused. As a result, Schulberg was told that his “entire attitude was wrong; that I was wrong about writing; wrong about this book; wrong about the Party…” For Schulberg, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. During his testimony, he says that at this time he “felt maybe, almost for the first time, that this was to me the real face of the Party…I felt I had talked to someone rigid and dictatorial who was trying to tell me how to live my life, and as far as I remember, I didn’t want to have anything more to do with them.” So Schulberg left the Communist Party. 

Schulberg’s testimony provides both an inside look into the experiences of a Communist Party member and calls into question the intent of the HUAC. What was their intention of subpoenaing a man who was a member of the Communist Party for only three years a decade prior? Was it really about investigating alleged subversive activity or was this government-sanctioned silencing of free speech? It seems that any information on subversive activity that he could have had would be useless by 1951, so the latter seems much more likely. Ultimately, Budd Schulberg’s testimony is only one piece in a much larger narrative that calls into question the House Un-American Activities Committee’s impact on private citizens and whether or not they existed as a genuine investigative committee or as a political theater that ostracized its victims.

To read Schulberg's full testimony, come to Rauner and request MS-978, box 126.

Posted for Ellie Appelgren '28, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2026 fall term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in Dartmouth's past. For more information, visit the program's website. 

The Word Imprinted

Way back in 1476, William Caxton returned to England from the continent with some fancy new tech to show off. While in Flanders he learned the relatively young art of printing. After a few years practicing the trade there, he packed up his press and headed home to see if there was an appetite for the printed word in England. There was.

Over the next 15 years, Caxton produced the earliest printed works in England. His taste was decidedly English. His first publication was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but he followed with other major works of English history and literature. We only have one complete work printed by Caxton--an oration by Cicero that Caxton himself translated into English--but we have a leaf from his 1477 printing of Chaucer. The typeface is a beast for the modern eye, but you can work it out with a little patience. That you can still read it shouldn't be taken for granted. How many human production still work as they were originally designed 550 years after they were made? Some buildings, a few bits of machinery, and a whole lot of books.

To see the Chaucer leaf, ask for Hickmott 201. The Cicero oration is Hickmott 203. 

Dartmouth Libraries Exhibit: "In Which Winnie-the-Pooh Turns One Hundred"

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published on October 14, 1926 as the second of four wildly successful children’s books by Alan Alexander (A. A.) Milne (When We Were Very Young, Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We Are Six, and The House at Pooh Corner). One hundred years later, these stories and characters are as beloved as ever, and Milne is remembered mainly as a children’s author. But Milne’s writing career began well before he introduced the world to Pooh, Piglet, and their friends. He made a name for himself as a master of light verse, an editor of The Granta and assistant editor of Punch, and a respected playwright with productions on Broadway and London’s West End. He crossed paths with many of the best-known writers and thinkers of his time and was well known among intellectual circles. He was also a committed pacifist and spoke out against fascism.

This exhibit explores Milne’s literary career—his earliest influences, his body of work, and his enduring impact—as shown by materials in the Dartmouth Libraries collections. The exhibit begins in Rauner Special Collections Library (Class of 1965 Galleries) and continues in Baker-Berry Library (Baker 2 West, outside room 234). It was curated by Rachel Starr, Research and Learning Specialist, and designed by Max Seidman, Exhibits and Graphic Arts Designer, and will be on display through December 4th of this year.

For more, visit the exhibit webpage:https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/exhibits/in-which-pooh-turns-one-hundred.

Brahe's Universe--What the Hell Was He Thinking?

After Copernicus laid out his fancy new theory placing the Sun at the center of the universe, and then Galileo argued so forcefully for it, you would think that any self-respecting astronomer would acquiesce and admit the Earth no longer held primacy in the universe. But Tycho Brahe was a stubborn cuss, and a stickler for good observation. He figured with the more accurate observations he could make with his state-of-the-art observatory, he could prove Copernicus and Galileo to be fools for doubting the long-held dogma that the Earth was the center of everything. Years of careful observation gave Brahe a trove of data.

Then came the hard part: fitting it all into his preconceived notions. There was no way to argue that some of the planets didn't revolve around the sun, but that didn't stop him from keeping the Earth in the middle. His elaborate scheme placed the Sun and Moon in orbit around the Earth, while Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and Venus circled the Sun. Jupiter retained its cluster of moons. The math behind all of this is way more complicated than what Newton would later come up with, but Brahe made it all fit. The two images pictured here are representations of Brahe's imagined universe from Andrea Cellarius's Harmonia macrocosmica (Amsterdam: Apud Gerardum Valk et Petrum Schenk, 1708). In his book, Cellarius non-judgmentally lays out all of the competing cosmographies and leaves it to the reader to decide their comfort level with heresy and science.

To see it in person come on in and ask for Rare QB41 .C39 1708.

Clip Off and Slap On

If you’ve been to the Rauner mezzanine this summer, you may have noticed that we’re offering swag: free stickers from the 1971 Liberated Woman’s Appointment Calendar and Survival Handbook, currently on display in our Rauner Staff Picks exhibit. The appointment calendar portion is something like a feminist version of a book of saints, featuring, instead of feast days, dates from women’s history that run the gamut from well-known (e.g., July 19, the first day of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention) to downright obscure (e.g., February 25, the day in 1959 when someone named Josephine Bay became the first woman to head a major steamship company). Paging through the calendar, it’s notable how many of the feminist anniversaries it memorializes are from the previous year. As the editors explain in the introduction, 1970 was the year that women’s liberation “burst into the headlines,” marking “a new chapter in female history — so many womanly accomplishments, you’d need a calendar to keep track.”

All of this is interesting, but what makes this book special are the “survival forms” at the back, including a “Charge of Discrimination Form” that can easily be filled out and sent to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a “Barefoot Pregnant Award of the Week for Advertising Degrading to Women” which can be clipped out and mailed to the offending company. And, of course, there are the stickers that can be slapped on things that insult women: ads, construction workers, enzyme detergents, midi-skirts, etc. We couldn’t let something this cool and funny stay locked up under glass, so we turned them into real stickers. Swing by our exhibit and grab some while supplies last.

To grab a feminist sticker, come to the mezzanine until next Friday, September 4th.

Print your own stickers with this PDF (Avery template 5163, easily found in any office supply store).

To view the Liberated Woman’s Appointment Calendar, request Rare HQ1105 .W639 online and then come to Rauner.

An Exhumation

Frederick Ransom was a member of the Class of 1820, though he did not reach graduation. We don't know much about him. He came from a local family in South Woodstock, Vermont, and died of tuberculosis in 1817, at the age of nineteen. The only reason we ran into his name is because of the steps his father took to prevent the disease from spreading to others in his family. 

Tuberculosis has a long history alongside humanity, and it remains the leading cause of death by infectious disease worldwide today. At the time that Frederick was sick, there was no effective treatment and the first successful immunization was still about a century away. It was a disease that destroyed whole families and communities, which may explain the drastic measures that were taken by Frederick's father after the young man succumbed to the disease. According to Frederick's younger brother Daniel:

"It was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it. And Father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried, and it was burned in Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge."

Frederick Ransom's story is considered part of a larger pattern now referred to as the New England Vampire Panic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, widespread outbreaks of tuberculosis in New England led to multiple instances of exhumation, burning, and sometimes even the consumption of ashes, all as folk medicine remedies for the disease. In some cases, there was an explicit fear that the dead were somehow feeding on the living, which was spreading the disease within families. We don't have enough details in Frederick's case to know if burning was prescribed as a preventative with or without the the undead concern. In any case, despite the precaution, Frederick's death was followed by the deaths of his mother, sister, and two brothers, also to tuberculosis.

We have Ransom's alumni file, but all it contains is a letter sent to the College in the 1930s with an excerpt from Daniel's unpublished diary which is quoted above. We don't know anything about him as a person or a student, and without his connection to this specific piece of folkloric history, we might not have anything but a name in our alumni catalog.

To see the little bit that we do have, ask for the alumni file for Frederick Ransom, Dartmouth Class of 1820. A copy of Daniel Ransom's unpublished diary is held by the Woodstock History Center. 

“Brave, Unselfish, Venerable Man”: The Private Champions of Nathan Lord’s Defense of Slavery

On July 24, 1863, Rev. Nathan Lord resigned the presidency of Dartmouth College, an office he had held for thirty-five years. He gave it up rather than retract his defense of slavery: a defense he had grounded in Scripture rather than morality, and one that had made him a liability to the College in the eyes of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and a favorite target of the abolitionist press. In the Northern public, Lord had become a pariah for his regular defences of slavery throughout the 1850s and an outright villain by the middle of the Civil War through his belief that Northern abolitionists had caused the conflict with their heresy and hypocrisy. However, in the period after his resignation, Lord was commended by some privately as a martyr. Over the following months, letters and money arrived from friends, former Dartmouth colleagues, and admirers who saw his resignation as a display of noble principle.

Lord had not always been slavery’s champion; in an 1839 letter he called it a “moral and political evil” and stated that it was the “obligation of all men to attempt the immediate and entire removal of it.”¹ By the 1850s, though, he had become perhaps the most prominent clerical apologist for slavery in New England. The trustee Amos Tuck, a Dartmouth graduate and a founder of the Republican Party in New Hampshire, brought before the Board’s 1863 annual meeting the resolutions of the Merrimack County Conference of Churches, which regretted the “popular prejudice” that Lord’s views had drawn and urged the trustees to consider a change in the presidency; Tuck then chaired the committee whose report reaffirmed the college’s loyalty to the Union. When the Board adopted it, Lord produced a resignation he had drafted a week earlier, read it to the members, and walked out.

Lord had, in a sense, seen this outcome in advance. Four years earlier, in a letter on John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry that was printed in the Richmond Whig, Lord had written that the Northern men who reasoned about slavery’s divine right as he did were “frequently maligned” and so “retire, for the most part, to their secret places, and wait to be justified.”² This characterization would later be reaffirmed as prophecy through his own experience with the Board and Northern press, but also by the quiet support which he received after his resignation.

The first to write was Joel Parker, the Harvard law professor and former New Hampshire Chief Justice, who had himself recently left the Dartmouth board. Days after the resignation, Parker congratulated Lord on being “well out of the concern” of an institution he expected only to “grow worse and worse.” The trustees, he wrote, were “a miserable board” now handed to “radical politicians, and radical ministers,” and Tuck in particular was “an ambitious party politician” and “a very coarse man besides.”

Two days later, writing from Hamilton, Canada West, an admirer by the name of Benjamin Douglass expressed “profound indignation” at the action that had forced the resignation and wrote to “honor your determination to stand fast by God’s truth.” Noting that friends in New Hampshire were already arranging “to free you from pecuniary cares,” Douglass offered more than sympathy: “I beg you would do me the honor to accept the small amount enclosed as a slight token of my esteem and affection.”

That support soon became organized, and it drew in the most eminent of Lord’s defenders. In November 1863, former U.S. president Franklin Pierce wrote to Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code, asking him to contribute to a life annuity fund for Lord and his wife. Lord’s situation, Pierce urged, “constitute[d] the strongest possible appeal”: here was “the only eminent and aged clergyman” who had “firmly withstood the onslaught of that fanaticism which had brought ruin upon our country,” a man who had staked his office and livelihood “for the maintenance of truth and the Constitution.” That stand had made him “a shining mark for abolition insolence and detraction” and, to Pierce, a “Brave, unselfish, venerable Man.” The following January, a Boston committee presented Lord and his wife with an annuity of twelve hundred dollars, raised, its organizers wrote, “with remarkable cheerfulness and hearty good will.”

These letters complicate the tidy story of the college’s removal of a pro-slavery president. Lord’s arguments were indefensible, and the trustees who eased him out stood on the right side of the war. But the correspondence shows that Lord did not experience his resignation as a reckoning. Supported by men who called his stubbornness courage and his defeat a sacrifice, Lord was proud to resign his office rather than his beliefs, writing to his nephew that he was “as free and happy as a bird, except for regret at seeing Dartmouth prostituted to a vile idolatry.” While the public record remembers a president forced out for defending slavery, the private record preserves the network of respectable men who made certain he paid as little as possible for it, and who were sure that history would prove him right.

You can view the letters from Parker (Mss 863454), Douglass (DP-6, Box 6625), Pierce (Mss 863456.1), Lord (Mss 863429), and the Boston committee (MS-510, Box 1, Folder 43); the 1863 Board of Trustees' meeting minutes (DA-1, Box 2117); Amos Tuck's report (Mss 863940); and Nathan Lord's pro-slavery manifesto, A True Picture of Abolition (MS-510, Box 1, Folder 27), by requesting them online and then visiting Rauner Library.

Posted for Bradley Edington '27, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2026 winter term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in Dartmouth's past. For more information, visit the program's website.

¹ Nathan Lord, letter to the editor, Vermont Chronicle (Bellows Falls, VT), July 10, 1839, https://www.newspapers.com/image/489365266/.

² Nathan Lord to J. M. Conrad, December 1, 1859, printed in Richmond Whig (Richmond, VA), December 16, 1859, https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=RWH18591216.1.1