[MICHIGAN & HARVARD] (Pre-publication) One Great Society: A Statement About Humane Learning...with Typed letter signed (TLS) from the author

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Before “antifa” was a hashtag, this Pulitzer Prize–winning humanist warned that universities were surrendering to fear and ideology. Written for the ACLS Commission on the Humanities at the height of the Cold War, Jones’s essay reads like an intellectual call to arms: knowledge as resistance, scholarship as dissent. He saw fascism not just in politics but in thought—where conformity kills curiosity

Jones, Howard Mumford.
One Great Society: A Statement About Humane Learning. For the Commission on the Humanities of the American Council of Learned Societies.
[Cambridge: ACLS, 1958.]

Quarto (11 x 8.5 in). [230] pp. Mechanically reproduced typescript. Spiral-bound in original red composition wrappers with silver lettering. Minor edgewear and handling to covers; internally clean.

Pre-publication draft, prepared as the final revised typescript for review by members of the American Council of Learned Societies' Commission on the Humanities. With typed letter signed (TLS) from the author on ACLS letterhead, dated May 13, 1958, and addressed to Pamela Taylor (Mrs. Francis Henry Taylor), then affiliated with the Worcester Museum of Art. Jones notes that this copy "must still go to members of the Commission before it is put into print," but he wished her to see it due to her late husband's involvement.

Howard Mumford Jones (1892–1980), Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar associated with U. M. & Harvard, was a key figure in American intellectual history and higher education policy. This early draft of One Great Society—later published in 1959—represents his influential call for a renewed commitment to humanistic inquiry during the Cold War era. Jones was an American intellectual historian, literary critic, journalist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard University. (Wikipedia)

A rare survival of Cold War-era academic advocacy, with letter from the chair of the ACLS Commission.