Barrows Dunham (1905-1995) was born in New Jersey into an academic family. His father, James Henry Dunham, was the dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University. At twelve, Dunham began studying Latin and added Greek to it the following year while continuing to read the classics in translation – once arguing with his father that Socrates was greater than Jesus.[1] After graduating from Princeton University with his undergraduate degree in 1926 and his doctorate in 1932, the Great Depression deepened, and Dunham began to wonder about the instability of his society. While reading a New Republic magazine, Dunham stumbled across an ad for a book entitled The Handbook of Marxism and decided to order a copy. After reading a section on Engels’ Anti-Dühring, he describes “a feeling of slipping. I was sliding in the direction that this passage pointed to. It was a sensation that I seemed to feel within my body, and as I slid I kept asking myself, ‘Do I want to go in this direction?’ And I said to myself, ‘Yes. I do want to go in this direction.’”[2]
In 1937, Barrows Dunham joined his father at Temple University as a member of the Department of Philosophy and, a year later, joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). As early as 1942, the FBI created a file on Dunham’s political activities, affiliations, and personal information. Dunham did not reach acclaim until the 1947 publication of his work Man Against Myth, which was a critical analysis of some myths used, according to Dunham, to conceal three chief characteristics of contemporary society: 1) “the deliberate denial of abundance (…) which our technology makes possible,” 2) “[the] gross inequality in the distribution of what we do produce,” and 3) “despite our democratic political institutions, we, the citizens of the United States, do not control our national economy.”[3] Throughout his book, Dunham uses the history of philosophy, including ancient Greek philosophy, to challenge the meaning, truth, presuppositions, implications, and effects of the myths on those who believed them. An example of this can be found in his discussion of the ethics of selfishness, regarding Thrasymachus and Socrates’ conversation in Plato’s Republic where he concludes that “small-scale injustice is far too risky; punishment and disgrace lie so near at hand as to make it certainly self-defeating,” while large-scale injustice is ” [4]
Man Against Myth soon moved Dunham even higher on the FBI’s watch list, and – despite leaving the CPUSA in 1945 – on February 27, 1953, Dunham appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to testify about the Communist affiliations of college professors. Dunham answered only three questions – his name and when and where he was born – before invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The next day, he was suspended from Temple University for “misusing” the Fifth Amendment and failing to cooperate with the HUAC. On September 23, 1953, Dunham was formally dismissed by Temple University and blacklisted from academic employment for over fourteen years. In 1981, Temple reinstated Dunham as a professor emeritus, acknowledging that he should not have been dismissed for exercising his constitutional rights and awarded him a lifetime pension. Despite his blacklisting, Dunham continued to publish books such as Giants in Chains (1953), The Artist in Society (1960), and Heroes and Heretics: A Political History of Western Thought (1964) – an analysis of philosophical and historical conflicts between individuals and the organised institutions in which they live, using figures such as Akhenaten, Socrates, and the American Founding Fathers.
Throughout his life, Dunham was attracted to works of antiquity. In an article entitled “The Fate of the Classics” (1944) he argued that Classics needed to be protected from those who attack the discipline for being not commercially profitable and that scholars who refuse to engage with present struggles are dooming their profession to obscurity. During the Allied war against fascism in Europe, Dunham argued that “modern scholarship, science, and political democracy were all born together – born of the revolutions which destroyed feudalism, born of the struggle against ignorance enforced by authority”. After the war, he argued, scholars would have to recognise that their discipline could not return to how it had been. Instead, they would need to fight and prove the continued relevance of the discipline.[5] How might classical scholars do this? Well, by extending the reach of the classical education, and the humanities more broadly, to all people (i.e. including the previously excluded working classes) and by learning to adapt what scholars know to their needs:
“If, therefore, scholars remain who measure the value of research by its inutility, who prize dead languages precisely because they are dead, who employ the classics as a foundation for snobbery, let them withdraw from our notice. The future is not for them, nor the past either. The road they tread leads, as Ezra Pound can tell them, to fascist broadcasts over the Rome radio and to such rewards as accompany those exercises. The rest of us will, I hope, join in resisting oppression, we who are scholars learning how to learn from the unschooled and how to adapt our knowledge to their needs.”[6]
The key is to demonstrate classical culture’s continued relevance to the present. To this end, Dunham draws frequent parallels between antiquity and modernity. For example, he writes that Thucydides, in his account of the Siege of Mytilene, tells of how the aristocracy of that city surrendered to the Athenians instead of acquiescing to the people and providing them with adequate food. In this he detects a close parallel to “the fall of France in 1940”.
“The aristocracy of Mytilene understood perfectly well the meaning of appeasement long before the advent of Mr. Chamberlain and M. Daladier.”[7]
Furthermore, Dunham argues that scholars must show how classical antiquity has influenced those societies that followed it:
“In these accumulated experiences of ancient peoples there is much of value to the modern man.”
But most importantly, Dunham explains that scholars must show that there is “not only instruction but a measure of hope”.
“Although the ancients were fond of looking backward to a golden age, they had in their best years a confidence in the present and some prospect of achievement in the future.”[8]
Dunham ends his article with a passage from Virgil’s Eclogues:
aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum,
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum;
aspice, venturo laetentur ut omnia saeclo!Behold the universe swaying with its vaulted mass,
Behold the lands and the expanses of the sea and the deep skies:
Behold how all things rejoice in the age that is to come![9]
This profile was written by Christopher Anaforian (PhD Candidate, University of St Andrews).
The feature image comes from Dunham’s grandson’s, website.
[1] Barrows Dunham, “The Philosophic Life,” In Marxism, Science and the Movement of History, edited by Alan R. Burger, Hyman R. Cohen, and David H. DeGrood. Amsterdam: B.R. Grüner, 1980. 228.
[2] Interview with Barrows Dunham by Fred Zimring. August 19, 1976, 79-80. Fred Zimring, “Academic Freedom and the Cold War: The Dismissal of Barrows Dunham from Temple University, A Case Study.” Ed.D diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1981.
[3] Barrows Dunham, Man Against Myth. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947, 19.
[4] Barrows Dunham, Man Against Myth. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947, 214. Plato’s Republic 1.343d-344c.
[5] Barrows Dunham, “For Nicholas Vlachos.” The Classical Journal 39, no. 4 (January, 1944): 218.
[6] Barrows Dunham, “For Nicholas Vlachos.” The Classical Journal 39, no. 4 (January, 1944): 219.
[7] Barrows Dunham, “For Nicholas Vlachos.” The Classical Journal 39, no. 4 (January, 1944): 220.
[8] Barrows Dunham, “For Nicholas Vlachos.” The Classical Journal 39, no. 4 (January, 1944): 222.
[9] Ecl. 5.50-52. Translation from Dunham’s “The Fate of the Classics”.
