178 BIRREN
student. Presumably, this was suspicious activity in the political climate
of the era. When I inquired of my colleague, he said that, yes, he had been
a member and that the university chaplain had recruited students to the
NAACP. He joined up but said he had not been active in the association
since he left Syracuse University. I was puzzled by the request and its
status, so I inquired of a lawyer who was familiar with the courts, what
I should do about a telephone inquiry of this character. He suggested
that I ask the personnel officer to put his request in writing and then
say I would put my reply in writing. When I phoned the personnel
officer to tell him of my position, he said “That is a great idea.” I never
heard any more about it. Presumably, the hierarchical system did not
want to go on record asking questions of this sort in writing since it
would be an apparent invasion of privacy.
A second episode of this sort in the 1950s involved a psychologist I
knew who was employed by the military. When I phoned him, he said,
“Don’t call me, my phone is being tapped.” He was later discharged from
government service. This was attributed to the fact that he refused to
testify about the political background of his wife’s first husband when
called before a hearing by McCarthy. The psychologist recovered from
the loss of his government position and later became professor of psy
chology at Yale University, but the disruption resulting from the termi
nation of his government employment was very unsettling.Conclusion
The 1950s were years of expansion of research in the NIMH, and the
Section on Aging was active contributing research findings to a growing
literature on aging. The productivity of the Section on Aging was en
couraged by the climate of optimistic support of research by the NIMH
and its leadership. The section’s research contributed to the replacement
of earlier simplistic assumptions about the nature of aging through its
many publications. The section’s research also contributed to modifying
the idea of an inevitable and universal pattern of decline with age in
mental capacities. What was coming to be apparent was that aging was
a complex set of processes, one of the most complex areas of research
facing science in the 21st century.