From the New York Times obituary of Leon Litwack, who was a longtime professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley:
He took his commitment to social justice with him to Berkeley, where he campaigned for Henry Wallace, the 1948 Progressive candidate for president, and protested the state's requirement that public employees, including university faculty, sign an oath of loyalty to the United States.
During the summers, while his better-off classmates went on vacation, he worked as a mess boy on freighters shipping out of San Francisco Bay, becoming active in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, one of the country's more left-wing labor organizations.
His activism — and refusal to sign a loyalty oath — got him fired from a student job at the Berkeley campus library, and in 1953 he was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But it also brought him in touch with his idols: He introduced Wallace when he came to speak at Berkeley; met Harry Bridges, the radical West Coast union leader; and talked with Du Bois about how American universities were teaching post-Civil War history.
The idea that campaigning for Henry Wallace, who was backed in 1948 by the Communist Party USA, was a sign of a "commitment to social justice" is laughable. What about justice for the victims of Stalin, the Soviet totalitarian dictator that Wallace wanted a soft line toward?
The entire passage shows an odd tendency to euphemize or dance around communism. The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union wasn't merely "left-wing." It was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1950 for being communist dominated. Likewise, Harry Bridges wasn't merely "radical"—he was the head of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, also expelled from the CIO in 1950 for being communist-dominated. A history of Bridges on the ILWU website reports that "he openly admired the Soviet experiment in Russia" and that "he condoned Stalin's agreement to a Non-Aggression Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939." The New York Times may use the words "radical" or "social justice" or "progressive" or "left wing" but here at Smartertimes we prefer, when discussing the Hitler-Stalin pact, to use more direct language.