“I Want You to Realize How Unfair You Have Been:” The Cold War’s Effect on the Friendship of Arthur Garfield Hays and C. Fulton Oursler

Abstract

To begin, it was a strong friendship. For about twenty-five years, Arthur Garfield Hays and Charles Fulton Oursler were close friends, spending time together, writing to each other, and sharing ideas and confidences. Even though they sprung from different backgrounds they had many similarities in aspiration and personality. For a while they embraced the same causes and positions. But they also differed widely in their reception of cultural and social modernism and over various public issues. Yet, for decades they managed to bridge significant cultural and ideological differences. Oursler saw Hays as one of his great friends and Hays treated Oursler as one of his closest friends. But with the Cold War heating up, and the fears of internal communist subversion reaching new peaks in 1950, their friendship was altered by Oursler. He wrote a letter to Hays which accused him of being a dupe of the communists at home and someone who refused to criticize communist regimes’ actions abroad. Hays in several replies to this letter attempted (and failed) to bridge the gulf that had grown between them over issues raised by the Cold War. Though patched together, never in the few years that remained in each man’s life was it restored to what it had been. This story is significant not just because Hays and Oursler were important opinion shapers at the time, but because what it shows about the effects of the second red scare on people’s thought and lives. It shows how the public disagreements of the Cold War entered people’s private lives. Arthur Garfield Hays was one of America’s leading civil liberties lawyers and one the nation’s leading advocates for civil liberties. Born to a prosperous Jewish-American manufacturing family from Rochester, Hays was educated at City College, Columbia, and Columbia Law School. From his family’s move to the city when he was twelve, cosmopolitan New York City became his only real home. He was a religious skeptic who always identified himself as a Jew. Before the First World War, he had established himself among New York City’s elite bar. The income from his private practice underwrote his activities on behalf of civil liberties. He was a key lawyer for the young American Civil Liberties Union, serving as its co-general counsel from 1929 to 1954. He was one of the first free speech absolutists in the ACLU and he was a notable critic of over active policing. In the 1920s, he began writing articles and books on public issues, usually civil liberties related. He was the author of four popular books advocating civil liberties and was a frequent public speaker and appeared on both radio and television. Thus, through virtually every medium available he pushed the United States toward