Neier: At that time, I was anticommunist. I was influenced by [George] Orwell and other writers during that period, but at the same time, not for persecuting those who held views that I, myself, did not share. I became a civil libertarian while I was in high school. We invited speakers from the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] to speak at the History Club. I was very conscious of the ACLU in that period.

Q: Who were some of the first speakers that you invited?

Neier: There was a man named Arthur Garfield Hays. He had been a general counsel of the ACLU. A general counsel is someone who is not on the staff but plays a leading role in determining the litigation strategy of the organization. Arthur Garfield Hays had joined Clarence [Seward] Darrow in the defense of John [Thomas] Scopes in Tennessee. He was a prominent lawyer, and he was the prominent ACLU official we had speak at Stuyvesant High School.

From Oral History Interview with Aryeh Neier.

Neier: I took advantage of the ability of students at the Labor Relations School to sample the best of what Cornell had in its arts and sciences school, but I also became close to a few of the faculty members at the Labor Relations School. I think the faculty member I became closest to be a woman named Alice [H.] Cook. And Alice Cook taught Labor History. And she had a guest with her at Cornell for a significant part of the period, that I was there, who came to classes with her and contributed. The guest was Frances Perkins. Frances Perkins had been the first woman in the cabinet of the United States; she was in the cabinet of Franklin D. Roosevelt [Former President of The United States], and she was the originator of much of the New Deal legislation. She was an extraordinary figure. She had been somebody who rallied workers in New York City after the Triangle Fire [Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire], which killed a large number of young women who were working in a factory not that far from here. And she proposed a lot of the social welfare legislation, and was an important figure in the New Deal. So having her join Alice Cook for classes was a very nice experience.

Neier: Where there was a lack of leadership by others, I felt I could step forward and lead. I organized the Cornell Forum for a particular reason. A leftover aspect of McCarthyism was speaker bans on various college campuses. For example, here in New York City, the president of the City College at that time, or the  City University, was a man named Buell [G.] Gallagher, and Buell Gallagher had forbidden anybody who had been a Communist or affiliated with a Communist organization to speak at The City College of New York, and a number of other colleges had done things of that sort. I wanted to test whether one could have somebody at Cornell, and the specific test took place after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. The Hungarian Revolution was November 1956. The man who was the editor of the Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper at that time, was a man named John Gates, and he had written an editorial for the Daily Worker. Given what the Soviet Union had done in crushing the Hungarian Revolution, we needed an American Communist party that was not tied to the Soviet Union, and not dominated by Soviet policy. That struck me as interesting at that time.

But Gates was very much an American Communist, so I decided to go and visit him at The Daily Worker, which I did. I met with him, but there was one of his colleagues in the room when I met with him, who I thought was probably a hard-liner Communist. In retrospect, my guess is, my visit to The Daily Worker was monitored by the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], they would have watched to see everybody who was going to The Daily Worker. But I invited John Gates to come to Cornell under the auspices of the Cornell Forum that I was organizing with these faculty members and my faculty advisors. And he agreed to come. I also invited a very prominent anti-Communist intellectual, a philosopher named Sidney Hook, to come, and we held a forum on the Cornell campus, and there was no difficulty whatsoever, the University didn’t do anything. So, I thought that established the principle that the speaker ban would not apply at Cornell. I know that a few students at other universities around the United States did similar things.

From Oral History Interview with Aryeh Neier.

Neier: I’d left the League for Industrial Democracy in—it was 1960, two years after I had been there. I had been not altogether successful there. The problem was that I had raised funds to expand the student organization, and one of the people I hired with those funds was Tom [Thomas Emmet] Hayden. And he and I had our political differences in that time. And basically, I fired him, but he won. That is that, the student organization, followed him rather than me. I was allied with a person who had been seen as Norman Thomas’ successor.

I don’t know if you know the name, Michael Harrington [Edward Michael Harrington, Jr.]. Michael Harrington is best-known for having written a book called The Other America, about poverty in the United States. And Dwight Macdonald—do you know the name Dwight Macdonald?—okay, Dwight Macdonald was then writing for The New Yorker. And Dwight Macdonald devoted a very lengthy article in The New Yorker to reviewing Michael Harrington’s book, The Other America. That became the basis for Lyndon [B.] Johnson’s war against poverty. It was the Harrington book that is considered the origin of the war against poverty. Harrington and I were the Democratic Socialists and anti-Communists. The group led by Hayden was not in any way Communists, but they were sort of anti-anti-Communist, and they issued what’s called the “Port Huron Statement.” I disagreed with that, Harrington disagreed with that, and basically, we lost. The student organization followed Tom Hayden.

So, I had changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society, but Students for a Democratic Society went with Hayden, and not with me. I’d left the League for Industrial Democracy and became an editor of a small public affairs periodical, Current magazine, which lasted a few years and then failed. But I went to work there and stayed there for about, well, until 1963, when I went to work for the ACLU.

From Oral History Interview with Aryeh Neier.