Moore received his B.A. in 1935 and went on to Harvard University for a year's worth of graduate study in philosophy. There he became acquainted with David Wight Prall, a member of Harvard's philosophy department who was, Moore recalls with a chuckle, a "fellow traveler." Prall, who wrote about aesthetics and the theory of value, became a significant supporter of the younger philosopher.

Moore then returned to the University of California, Berkeley, for more graduate work, finding that he could live there less expensively than in the East. Politics on campus had become even more fiery in the meantime. While he labored away at the substantial coursework, research, and writing for his Ph.D., Moore joined the local communist party, which confined its membership and activities primarily to the Berkeley campus. This was a time of crisis and engagement for intellectuals worldwide, and the young student of philosophy took his stand: "Fascism and communism seemed the main combatants, and the positions in between seemed rather pale by comparison."

In further reflecting on his days as a graduate student at Berkeley in the thirties, Moore added: "The thing that radicalized me was the experience of the campus and the student movement. As far as intellectual influence went, the predominant influence in the Marxist direction was a Chinese named Chu Tong," a fellow student of philosophy. Chu was a Marxist, "but, like many Marxists, he had not read Marx's Capital." One who had read Capital was Moore. Which is why he referred to Marx, laughingly, as his "silent partner" when describing his Ph.D. thesis on Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and the political theory of the state.

The Ph.D. came in 1940, followed by two years of teaching at Harvard. Moore then entered the U.S. Air Force in 1942. "I went into the military through the mechanism of the draft. One of the reasons I didn't apply for a direct commission was to avoid investigation, which might have resulted in my being turned down for political reasons." The Marxist philosopher was ready to help defeat global fascism, just as were Americans from all walks of life, and political differences that raged before and after the war were put aside in favor of the common goal.

The wartime concord between the Soviet Union and the other allies began to unravel even before the war had been won. And as the Cold War began to take shape, Moore, who was soon to embark on intensive study in the Russian language, had divided feelings: "I recognized there were all sorts of injustices and shortcomings in the Soviet Union, but I believed, on the whole, in the long run, it was a worthy model to be copied."

Before diving back into the competitive hunt for a job as a professor in his field in the United States, Moore was able to get the Air Force to send him to Cambridge University, and he speaks of his two terms there with both animation and wistfulness. Certainly the lectures he attended on economic and political theory were stimulating intellectually. But one suspects that he remembers that period, against the backdrop of his next move--from Cambridge to Reed College and the succeeding decade or more of Cold War strife and recrimination in America, as a time of calm repose before the storm.

A full account of the "Moore affair"--"Oregon Tests Academic Freedom in (Cold) Wartime: The Reed College Trustees versus Stanley Moore," by Michael Munk--is published in the fall 1996 issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Rick Harmon is the editor of the Quarterly.