Former Institute associates were systematically held at distance and dispersed into American academia

Evidence

Fromm continued to be dismissed as a revisionist, although his writings went on appearing alongside those of Horkheimer and Adorno in volumes edited by third parties. Marcuse remained constantly in touch with Horkheimer but was held at a distance. Neumann was occasionally asked for legal advice. Kirchheimer was consulted sporadically. All three of them remained in government service years after the end of the war, and eventually, during the 1950s, they all managed to find posts at American universities. Grossmann was given a small pension by the Institute. Contact with Wittfogel became more and more sporadic during the 1940s, and formally ended in 1947 when the University of Washington at Seattle and Columbia University became the sponsors of his China History Project, in place of the Institute of Social Research and the Institute of Pacific Relations. When an attempt was made in 1951 to prove that the Institute of Pacific Relations had had communist members of staff who had contributed to the defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek and the victory of the Chinese communists, Wittfogel was called before the McCarthy Committee, a sub-committee of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. An apostate communist, he made a sorry spectacle of himself as he denounced a former associate of the Institute of Social Research, Moses Finkelstein, as a communist. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1637

Categorization

• SEED: The Wittfogel episode - an apostate communist denouncing his former Institute associate to McCarthy’s committee - is a vivid vignette for an essay on how exile institutions shed politically compromised former members.
• XREF: Connects to scholarship on McCarthyism’s purge of the Institute of Pacific Relations and academic freedom in the 1950s. — connects to: The USA’s entry into war created the academic employment openings that dispersed the Institute — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1223; Former Institut members scattered into American universities and government rather than returning together — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 855; The exiled Institute cultivated American scholarly ties to legitimize itself — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 3317 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Former Institut members scattered into American universities and government rather than returning together #corroborates (0.95) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 855
• The exiled Institute cultivated American scholarly ties to legitimize itself #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 3317
• Personal American attachments prevented some Institut members from returning to Germany #exemplifies (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 853
• Institutional disintegration resulted partly from the scattering of exiled scholars #expands (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1029