The Ecole Libre at the New School 1941-1946

Social Research, Winter, 1998 by Aristide R. Zolberg

Prologue: Those Who Did Not Come

In 1939, Marc Bloch reached the apex of the French academic pyramid. Cofounder with Lucien Febvre of Annales, the journal that revolutionized social and economic history, he was also an ardent practitioner of the comparative method, seeking thereby to rebuild bridges between history and the social sciences (Fink, 1989, pp. 128-204). In the first half of the decade, his protracted campaign for appointment to the prestigious College de France foundered on anti-Semitism; but in 1936, he finally succeeded in being reassigned from his provincial university at Clermont-Ferrand to the prestigious and influential Sorbonne. His spirit bolstered by this vindication, he now completed his long-delayed masterwork on feudal society (Bloch, 1939 and 1940). Bloch's reputation in the English-speaking world--launched in 1931 by the publication of a seminal article on feudal society in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, coedited by Alvin Johnson, founding president of the New School for Social Research--was further enhanced by the lectures he delivered, in English, at Cambridge in 1938.

But now the historian was himself caught up in history. Between the publication of the first volume of La Societe feodale in 1939 and the second the following year, war erupted between France and Germany. By virtue of his age--he was fifty-three at the time--and as the father of six children, Bloch was free of any military obligation; nevertheless, he responded unhesitatingly for the second time in his lifetime to the call to defend the land of his ancestors, who had been French since Louis XIV acquired Alsace in the late-seventeenth century. Mobilized as a reserve captain, responsible for the procurement of fuel for the First Army, he was on assignment in Brittany when the advancing Germans caught up with him in June 1940. Aware of the total collapse of French forces, Bloch was determined to avoid being captured as a prisoner of war. Taking advantage of the chaos, he donned civilian clothes and headed south to join his family in their summer home in the Creuse, a department located below the armistice line that ran across the middle of France, and hence not subject to German occupation.

As native-born French citizens under the jurisdiction of the French government newly established by Marshall Petain at Vichy, the Bloch family was in no immediate danger. Nevertheless, the historian was deeply uneasy about the future, and toward the end of July he interrupted the drafting of his perceptive war memoir, Strange Defeat, to contact acquaintances in the United States regarding the possibility of obtaining a teaching position there. His letter of July 25, 1940, to W. G. Leland, director of the American Council of Learned Societies, begins with a patriotic assertion of confidence in the future of France, which Bloch pledges he will continue serving; but he goes on to explain that at this time he must think of his children first and keep in mind "the menaces that will prey on them in the coming years."(1) To dispel any ambiguity, he informs Leland that

   I am--you surely are not unaware of it--Jewish by birth. Without drawing
   from this origin either shame or pride, I have never hidden it. You know
   France well; therefore you know that nothing could be more remote from the
   true spirit of the French people than "racial" prejudices. However, who
   would dare affirm that under present circumstances, as a result of foreign
   pressure, my children are not running the risk of becoming the victims of
   manifest or underhanded persecution?

Reporting that he now speaks and writes English fluently, he suggests that even a short-term visiting appointment would do. But he insists that the authorization to enter the United States must be valid also for his wife and six children, ranging in age from ten to twenty. He further mentions his eighty-two-year-old mother, who was living with him at the time, but is not sure whether she will be able to accompany the family.

While awaiting a response, Bloch visited the Ministry of Education in Vichy, where a friendly official advised that in view of the dangers he would face in occupied Paris, he should apply for a transfer to a teaching post in the unoccupied zone. Accordingly, on October 23, the ministry provisionally assigned him to his old institution, the University of Strasbourg, which had been evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand, where it was scheduled to operate for the duration of the war.

Meanwhile, Leland forwarded the request to potentially helpful parties, notably the Rockefeller Foundation and Alvin Johnson, who had cooperated earlier in a rescue operation on behalf of German exiles. The program was shaped by the severe constraints arising from the restrictive American immigration laws. In short, the admission system established in the 1920s was designed to minimize immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe by establishing a limit of some 150,000 European immigration visas annually, to be allocated on the basis of national origins quotas proportional to the putative ascendancy of the American population. Further tightened after the onset of the depression, the procedure for obtaining a visa was lengthy and arduous, even for the relatively favored West Europeans. Most important, the system made no provision whatsoever for the admission of refugees in need of a haven. However, American immigration policy also reflected a yen for nationalist accumulation; quota discriminations notwithstanding, outstanding artists and scientists of any nationality who were of "special interest" to the United States were eligible for speedy admission on a nonquota basis. This required, in effect, the prospect of a position in an established American institution. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the Rockefeller Foundation provided travel funds for bringing a limited number of academics and their families to the United States, and subsidized positions in universities willing to appoint them. Since in reality, far from there being a demand for their services there was a dearth of available positions in the academic world because of the depression and widespread anti-Semitism (the latter especially among the prestigious Ivy League universities), Alvin Johnson took the initiative of creating altogether new ones by launching at the New School the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, popularly known as the "University in Exile."