June 11, 1951

President Blanding conferred the bachelor’s degree on 309 members of the Class of 1951 at Commencement in the Outdoor Theater. In his commencement address, former Massachusetts governor Robert F. Bradford drew on recent revelations of government alliance with organized crime by Senator Este Kefauver’s Senate Crime Investigating Committee to denounce paternalism in government. Bradford asserted that “the real villain in the Kefauver drama is not the sleazy racketeer, or even the cheap politician who has ridden into office on his back. It is John and Jane citizen who have tolerated all this, and tolerate it today.” Public disengagement from the work of active citizenship, he said, had created “a new type of American Government—a hand-out government, tax and tax, spend and spend, until government has a hand in everyone’s business…. If you throw away the formula for individual liberty, and substitute a mother-knows-best government, you may have gained temporary benefits, but you have lost the permanent source of all benefits, the right to be free.”

The New York Times