Template:Did you know nominations/Gene Weltfish

Gene Weltfish

 * Symbol possible vote.svg... that anthropologist Gene Weltfish lost her position of 16 year at Columbia University, when she was suspected of being a communist during the second red scare?


 * ALT0 (original rejected hook) ... that anthropologist Gene Weltfish was terminated from her position at Columbia University in 1953 after refusing to answer whether she was a communist in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities? ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 12:12, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Created/expanded by Maunus (talk). Self nom at 00:40, 24 July 2012 (UTC)




 * I created this as a stub on july 16th and didn't have time to finish work on it untill today (but not a five fold expansion). So technically it doesn't qualify on the date. I'm hoping for a bit of leeway.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:43, 24 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't mind giving you the leeway if you could [1] shorten the hook (must be under 200 characters), [2] put more footnotes in your article (every single paragraph must have at least one), [3] fix the formatting of your refs (no bare URLs, please!) and [4] perform a QPQ peer review of another contributor's DYK nom. Thanks. --PFHLai (talk) 20:47, 28 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Symbol question.svg The article length qualifies. Every paragraph has at least one footnote, but I think some paragraphs are far too long. I've eliminated the bare-URL reference -- I removed it entirely because it cited a source that explicitly indicates it should not be treated as a valid source for research, and the information is in another source. I could not verify the hook fact. The Pathe source that is cited contradicts both the article and the hook, indicating that she was questioned by the Senate Internal Security Committee (not HUAC), furthermore, it does not say that she refused to answer. Also, a quid pro quo review is still needed. --Orlady (talk) 17:06, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The hook fact is in Price (and is cited to Price, not Pathe) who gives a transcript of her questioning in which she repeatedly invokes the fifth amendment when aked about her own political affiliations. I am quite sure it is the House committee, but I will check whether I am confusing the two. She was questioned by Senator McCarthy himself. It is also a possibility that she was questioned twice. I will read for the details in the given source.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 20:37, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * The version that I reviewed cited Pathe for the hook fact. I'm glad to see that you've added a footnote to Price now. McCarthy was a Senator, so it's entirely logical that if he questioned her the hearing was a hearing of the Senate Internal Security Committee he chaired, and not a hearing of the House committee. --Orlady (talk) 22:51, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * I found a Google Books preview of the Price book online. I found several details there that are different from what the Wikipedia article says. Price states (page 111) that the FBI had been "interested" in Weltfish since the late 1930s (not after getting a report from Ralph Linton in the early 1950s) and tells (starting on about page 112) about the FBI's monitoring of her correspondence and activities in the 1940s. Price describes questioning in 1952 by attorney Robert Morris of the McCarran committee in the Senate, during which Weltfish invoked the 5th Amendment when was asked about Nina Popova. Price also describes an April 1, 1953 hearing before McCarthy's subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, in which she was questioned by several different Senators. On pages 130-131 Price reports questioning by McCarthy (but the prefatory paragraph says it was questioning by Senator McClellan of Arkansas -- either the prefatory paragraph or the transcript has an error) in which she refused to answer a question about whether she had given in speech in 1952 offering to prove Communist charges that the U.S. had used germ warfare in Korea. I don't see any indication that she was directly asked if she was a communist (but I cannot see the whole book). Price indicates that there is no record of why Columbia dismissed her (and also that his sources told him she was not technically "fired" because she had a year-to-year appointment), so the article's implication that she was fired for refusing to answer whether she was a communist is not supported. --Orlady (talk) 23:35, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Well accuracy is certainly a nice thing. I think Price very clearly strongly suggests that she was not renewed because of the board of trustees being afraid of being connected to her after the hearing. In anycase Weltfish herself used the word "when Columbia was trying to fire me" in a later interview that I can cite to Sydel Silverman's Totem's and teachers, and the entire point of the book is that she lost her employment due to the communist scare. Also the hook does not say "because she refused to answer", but "after refusing to answer" there is a difference. Price describes Linton giving information on Weltfish and Benedict in 1944, and clearly relates it to the FBI's sustained/incrrased interest in Weltfish - I can reword this to show the relation better. Thanks for pushing for greater accuracy. And yes she was directly asked if she was a communist several times (see Price p.127).·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 23:44, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * [Edit conflict] Verifiability (not accuracy) is pretty important for DYK. Since posting earlier, I found that page 128 of Price (not visible in the first version of the preview that I saw, but visible in another version) states that Roy Cohn questioned her about her political affiliation and she refused to answer. However, that part of the transcript also indicates that she had already been dismissed by Columbia before the April 1 hearing, apparently due to publicity about her having been subpoenaed. --Orlady (talk) 23:50, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * all of thr sources agree that there was a causal relation between her losing her job at Columbia and her being investigated for communist sympathies. That really is not controversial or unverifiable.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 23:53, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol question.svg Yes, it is clear that the loss of her job was related to the Senate investigation. However, I am not going to OK any hook for this article as long as the article claims that Senator Joe McCarthy was chairman of a House of Representatives committee. That's an easy sort of mistake to make (I imagine that almost everyone who knows much of anything about McCarthy associates him with HUAC), but refusing to try to correct the error seems like a serious level of disregard for information quality. (Also, some recent experiences at DYK caused me to conclude that a lot of readers have no clue who Joe McCarthy was, nor what "his committee" might have been about. Vaguefying the hook by eliminating details that aren't supported by sources makes it ineffective -- better to have a validated hook fact.) --Orlady (talk) 00:56, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I haven't "refused" anything, I just haven't had a chance to check the pages in Price that are likely to clarify which committee or committee or committees she was interviewed by, and if it is a subcommittee what it was a subcommittee of - and what their relation to McCarthy's other more famous committee was. The mistake was of course made initially because I was unaware of the fact that apparently there was an impressive number of committees dedicated to finding communists al related to McCarthy in various ways - I would like to be able to describe the relation between those. So I haven't changed the fact in the article lead, because I am not sure what to change it to. I don't know what exactly is your point regarding people's lack of knowledge about Joseph McCarthy. Are you suggesting that we should make the hook more clear to people who are unaware of that part of American history? We could do that by writing for example "... that anthropologist Gene Weltfish's lost her job when her history of social activism made the FBI suspect that she was a communist".·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:05, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks for clarifying. I have no problem letting you take more time to check the sources. My comment about people not knowing about Joe McCarthy related to a proposed hook (and article) I reviewed that stated as fact that a particular organization was a communist front organization, with the source for that information being assertions by McCarthy, HUAC, etc. The nominator seemed to be totally unaware of the history of the period. This experience leads me to think that an effective hook needs to say something more specific about the nature of the investigation that led to her dismissal. --Orlady (talk) 01:29, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Ok, I got a hand on Price and that cleared it up. She was interviewed in 1952 by the McCarran committee and in 1953 by a McCarthy subcommittee of the Committee for Government Operations. She was fired in 1953 shortly before the second hearing, and not in 1952 as Pathe states (price explicitly mentions that Pathe is wrong). I've given it a try with a new hook as well.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:55, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Symbol confirmed.svg OK, the article is in reasonably good shape now. I'm glad to see that the discrepancies have been ironed out. (FWIW, another factual discrepancy I've noticed is that some sources give her death date as August 12 rather than August 2. However, because one source that gives the August 12 date cites a New York Times obituary published on August 5, I concluded that the August 2 date is correct.) I did some copyedit work on the article, added more footnotes where they were needed, and changed section sequence so that the pamphlet would be described before the Senate hearing where it was attacked.


 * Regarding the hook, I notice that you have changed the proposed hook a couple of times in the course of this discussion. Please don't do that -- it makes it harder to follow the discussion. When you want to propose a different hook during an ongoing, the usual practice is to propose an ALT hook in the discussion body. Often people strikethrough the original hook to show that it has been rejected.


 * The proposed hook currently on display here is not the one that I put the review symbol in front of, and it doesn't include the elements that were discussed above. The facts in the current proposed hook are supported by sources, but I have some quibbles at the detail level. Specifically, I don't like calling the era the "second red square" because I'm not familiar with that term being used for the period under discussion. I think of the Red Scare as having been the 1918-1921 period, and I know the period under discussion by terms such as the McCarthy Era, McCarthyism, Cold War red-baiting, Cold War anticommunism, and the blacklist era. I guess that many history textbooks now call it the second red scare, but Americans who (like me) haven't been in school recently will be confused by that term and may click on "second red scare" instead of the Weltfish article. Further, the "16 year" part is a minor detail that doesn't help attract readers; that's something that likely would be trimmed out when this is in a DYK queue. I'd like to endorse the following revised wording (which I'm calling ALT2 in case someone wants to resurrect the past proposals for the discussion record):


 * ALT2 ... that in 1953, anthropologist Gene Weltfish lost her Columbia University faculty job and could not find another when U.S. Senators investigated her for alleged subversive activities?


 * That is largely the same hook fact (and is supported by sources), the length is OK, and it doesn't confuse me with new terminology for topics that I thought I knew about. --Orlady (talk) 06:00, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Sounds basically fine to me, but don't you think that by writing specifically that the suspicion was of being a communist, some of those who know less about US history will understand the situation better? I've added the original hook below.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 12:12, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't get the impression from the article or the sources that "being a communist" was their main concern about Weltfish, and it surely wasn't their only concern. Their questioning of her indicated a much broader array of accusations, including "Communist sympathies", affiliation with organizations that they thought were Communist fronts, actions that they considered to have aided or abetted Communist causes (i.e., suggesting that the U.S. had used biological warfare in Korea), and subverting America by saying that black people are no less intelligent than whites. To convey the breadth of their accusations (which, to me, make their investigations and the blacklisting more frightening than if they had only targeted actual Communist Party members) while incorporating a well-known buzzword, that could be changed to refer to "Un-American activities":
 * ALT3 ... that anthropologist Gene Weltfish lost her Columbia University faculty job and could not find another when U.S. Senators investigated her for alleged un-American activities?
 * BTW, I thought of a substitute for "second red scare" that would be meaningful to all readers familiar with that period: "1950s red scare". --Orlady (talk) 13:48, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
 * That's good, I like ALT3. How about linking Un-American activities to McCarthyism? "Second red scare" redirects to McCarthyism, but we could also link "1950s red scare" to that page.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:46, 5 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I put a link to McCarthyism into ALT3. :-) --Orlady (talk) 17:21, 5 August 2012 (UTC)


 * I've reviewed Henrik Vibskov, Manganvesuvianite and 8th of March Revolution.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:51, 29 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Pictogram voting keep.svg Length, date (per above), ALT3 hook checked out, good to go; re hook ref, possible agenda per title shouldn't invalidate hook; supremely interesting and important article, thanks, Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 18:31, 5 August 2012 (UTC)