BY HANK REICHMAN
Leon Wofsy
Leon Wofsy, Emeritus Professor of Immunology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, died August 25 at the age of 97. Although I have been a graduate student and instructor at Berkeley and lived most of my adult life within a mile or two of the campus, I don’t think I ever met Wofsy, but I certainly knew of him. However, until I read this obituary yesterday I did not realize what an extraordinary life he had led. Wofsy did not enter graduate school until he was 37, a relatively advanced age for someone in the sciences. His first career was as a radical organizer in the American Student Union, the Young Communist League, and, after service in WW2, the Labor Youth League. Harassed during the McCarthy era, he left the Communist movement in 1956 — but did not abandon his progressive values — and turned to science, earning the PhD in 1961 from Yale. As an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle explained, “he distinguished himself as a scientist through pioneering research on the use of antibodies to deliver effective therapies directly and specifically to the site of disease. His work proved to be visionary in helping to lay the foundation for the later development of ‘precision’ therapies that are now widely used in the treatment of cancer, immunologic diseases, and many other disorders.”
But Wofsy may be best remembered for his role as a faculty leader during the tumultuous 1960s and especially during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM). He arrived at Berkeley late in the summer of 1964, less than two months before the FSM would erupt. His arrival had been delayed while the UC Regents held up his appointment because of his earlier leftist affiliations — none other than J. Edgar Hoover had earlier written California Governor Pat Brown to warn him of Wofsy’s arrival in the Golden State — but faculty in his department mounted a successful defense. Although his instincts were to keep a low political profile given his recent arrival and his controversial past, Wofsy soon was swept up in the growing movement among faculty to support the student demands for free speech. Joined by two other junior faculty members, historians Lawrence Levine and my mentor Reginald Zelnik, both of whom passed away far too young, Wofsy played a critical role in winning support for the movement among his colleagues, as he recalled in a brief memoir published in the 2002 collection, The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s, edited by Zelnik and NYU historian Robert Cohen.
That memoir extended beyond the FSM to encompass the rest of Wofsy’s ’60s experience, including his encounter with California Governor Ronald Reagan during the May 1969 People’s Park controversy. (I would arrive in Berkeley to begin graduate school just three months later and I’m a bit ashamed that I let the 50th anniversary of those events pass without acknowledgment on this blog.) Wofsy was “not swept up in the excitement and symbolism of People’s Park,” but as one person was killed and another blinded after police swept the streets, helicopters spewed tear gas over the campus, and Reagan called out the National Guard to occupy the city, he and other faculty members felt compelled to act. And so,
on May 21, 1969, seventeen professors took off for Sacramento to see if we could prevail on legislators to use their influence to call off the Guard and reduce the risk of greater tragedy. We took our mission very seriously, did not seek publicity that might jeopardize our effort, and did not ask to see the Governor, so as not to risk an inflammatory confrontation.
Governor Reagan, however, had a different agenda. As we talked with individual legislators and felt we were making headway, a message came that he wanted to see us. At the small auditorium to which we were summoned, we entered into a media event. Television cameras from all of the networks and dozens of reporters were there. Then Reagan came in and strode to the podium as the cameras flashed.
Nobel laureate Owen Chamberlain spoke for us and quietly began to tell the governor why we had come. He got not further than a sentence or two when the governor took over. Waving a pointed finger at us, he declared that “you professors” are responsible for all the violence, “you” told your students that they could break the law. Reagan went on, lecturing and accusing the eggheads for the benefit of the evening TV news and the morning headlines.
Here my story of that day becomes more personal. Fearing that our mission was ending in a disastrous propaganda coup for the governor, I interrupted his monologue and said something like, “That’s a fine political speech, Governor, but we came here to talk reason, to see what can be done to avoid further violence.” I will not try to reproduce the back and forth debate of the next fifteen or so minutes. Thanks to the governor, it was all captured on TV by eager crews who were unabashedly delighted by the rare unstaged drama. Reagan demanded at once to know “who are you?” then said he knew my name well and wouldn’t be surprised at anything I said. When I said that the governor was responsible for the atmosphere of intimidation, for trying to run the campus by bayonet, for firing and threatening to fire any University administrator who might be willing to negotiate, he exploded with rage and shouted “liar.”
That whole scene inevitably received a great deal of publicity, worldwide, most of it favorable to our faculty plea. My instant notoriety brought me a flood of letters, about half of them congratulatory. The other half was hate mail full of anti-Semitic and other racist vulgarity. There were death threats, including a funeral wreath. A paramilitary group wrote that it voted by a slim margin to permit me to finish out the semester, after which I would be terminated if I ever tried to teach again.
Reading this story today, one cannot help but notice the parallels with the present. There is the cynical effort to manipulate the media for political gain. There is the harassing hate mail, today amplified by the spread of social media and the Internet. But perhaps most striking is how Reagan’s anti-intellectual attack on the faculty is so widely echoed today by the likes of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who said this to an audience of college students: “The fight against the education establishment extends to you, too. The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously what to think.”
In 2014 Wofsy sat down for an oral history interview in which he discussed the events of the ’60s, but also the California loyalty oath controversy, the late FSM leader Mario Savio, and the role of the faculty in the university and society. It is well worth watching:
The Berkeley Historical Society has also recorded videos of Wofsy’s recollections of his years as the son of Communist activists and as a radical youth organizer. They are here, here, and here.
I only learned after his death that Wofsy had an online blog, Leon’s OpEd, in which he regularly posted commentary on current events. Here, to conclude this appreciation, are two excerpts from that site. First, Wofsy’s final post, from less than a month before his death, was excerpted from a talk he gave on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War. In it he said,
The world learned about the nature of fascism in the last century. But current events urgently call for reeducation. The danger of fascism grows out of the deepest problems of our society, out of a system in which greed and super-wealth dominate at the expense of human needs and rights. It brings to power the most reactionary multi-billionaires. While it is hardest on the poorest and most oppressed, its racist, nativist, misogynist divisiveness makes it an extreme threat to the broadest segments of society as a whole. That means that defeating fascism requires not only the courageous persistence of those communities under attack and their supporters, but it requires the broadest possible united efforts among people whose opinions and even interests are bound to differ. That’s one of the lessons, the most important one, that’s left to us by the “premature anti-fascists” of the 1930s. If that proved essential when fascism threatened from abroad, it’s as crucial today when the menace is emerging on home terrain.
Some historians of the Spanish Civil War focus on ideological conflict between various factions of communists, socialists and anarchists. That conflict on the Left surely cast a shadow over those times. But 80-plus years later, what inspires is the heroism of the Spanish people and the many volunteers who came from many lands to fight and die alongside them. The big story is the legacy left to us by the “premature anti-fascists” of the 1930s.
In the Fall of 2018, he posted the text of a talk he gave at a Berkeley get-out-the-vote rally on the eve of the midterm elections. Here is what he told the crowd:
I’m Leon Wofsy, Emeritus Professor of Immunology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. I joined the Berkeley faculty in 1964 just a few months before the Free Speech Movement erupted. I agreed with and supported the student protesters and soon came to know and admire Mario Savio and many others for their courage and integrity. I also formed close friendships with other faculty defenders of free speech, especially with two bright and principled young History professors who were closest to the students in age and spirit, Reggie Zelnik and Larry Levine, both of whom, like Mario Savio, died much too young. Howard Schachman, Professor of Biochemistry, and I came together at these steps on the morning the students who occupied Sproul Hall were hauled off under arrest. We arranged a faculty meeting for that evening which formed the Committee of 200 that supported the students and eventually helped fashion the terms of the historic victory for Free Speech on this campus. I’ll leave it to Professor Charlie Sellers, who was a major co-author of that Free Speech testament, to say more about those days of protest and activism that are so relevant to today’s urgent effort to get out a massive vote.
In my very long life, 97 years so far, I’ve seen many assaults on democracy and free speech. A childhood experience was the arrest and brutal beating inside the Stamford Connecticut police station of my father and twelve others who rallied for unemployment insurance during the Great Depression. There were the lynchings of returning African-American vets and their brides in Augusta, Georgia after World War II; later on the murder of Emmet Till, and, to this day, wanton police killings of unarmed youths. There was the shameful period of McCarthyism and a recurring history of bigoted attacks on immigrants, gays and ethnic minorities. But whenever democracy was challenged and in danger, people rose to the challenge, especially as new generations of young people led the way.
The American Civil Liberties Union has a get out the vote slogan: “Vote as if your rights depend on it!” They might well say “as if lives depend on it!” After the events of this last week, the mail bombings and the mass murder of Jews in a synagogue, sanity requires a serious take on where we are, what’s at stake and why a massive voter turnout is a historic necessity. Democracy is clearly in crisis, here and elsewhere around the world. For us, the danger to democracy may be greater than at anytime since the Civil War. For your generation it is certainly a matter of rights and lives, your lives and the life of the planet. The challenge is nothing less than to reverse the descent into authoritarianism and violence. It is to help bring about a time when the first priorities of government, ours and many others, are to cope decisively with climate change, poverty, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe. It may take more than one generation, but it starts with the millions of young people, women and men, Black, Latino, and all others who are going extra miles to get out the vote across the country. Rights and lives do depend on it!
