The Liberal Club Affair
On April 18, 1929, the Liberal Club, a student organization chaired by a sophomore, William Albertson, requested a room to hold a meeting where members could discuss a “pressing issue.” Permission was granted. On April 18th, the placards announcing the meeting indicated that its purpose was to demand the unconditional release of Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings, who had been tried and sentenced to life imprisonment for allegedly throwing a bomb into a patriotic parade in 1916. The trial and sentence had been a focus of controversy for many years. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette referred to the case as “one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the United States.”
When the university administration realized the purpose of the meeting, they withdrew permission for the room. Albertson, without telling his faculty advisor that permission had been withdrawn, went ahead with the meeting and engaged as a speaker Harry Elmore Barnes, a historian and a member of the “Free Mooney-Billings” national committee. When the group arrived at Alumni Hall, they were forbidden entry. They moved to the steps of Thaw Hall for an open meeting, and again they were forced to move along. With a crowd, now, of about 100, they held the meeting in the parking lot of the Concordia Club. By this time the event had attracted the press. Articles and editorials appeared in local and national newspapers.
The Chancellor then forbade the Liberal Club from holding meetings on campus. The club defied the ban and Chancellor Bowman, with the approval of the Board of Trustees, had Albertson and two other students expelled from the university.
Twenty six members of the faculty signed a petition asking the Chancellor to call a faculty meeting to explain his actions. He refused. Nine of the 26 were recently hired Assistant Professors in the English department: Ralph H. Ware, E.E. Ericson, Putnam Jones, Marvin Herrick, H. W. Schoenberger, Joseph Blickensberger, Benjamin McClure, Guy Greene and W. M. Parrish. A later report in the university archives indicates that careers of those faculty members who signed the petition were not adversely affected. The case was investigated by the AAUP, who issued a report, “Academic Freedom at the University of Pittsburgh.” The Liberal Club affair, seen as a serious assault on academic freedom, continued to haunt the Bowman administration well into the 1930s.
As for William Albertson, he
was active for a time in the trade union movement in New York City and then returned to Pittsburgh to become organizational secretary for the [Communist] Party in the Pittsburgh district. He was tried and convicted in federal court in 1953 under the Smith Act of “conspiring to teach and advocate the duty or necessity” of the overthrow of the government by violent means. That conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1956.
Robert C. Alperts, Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh, 1787-1987
