H. Bruce Franklin, scholar dismissed for his anti-war views, has died at the age of 90

H. Bruce Franklin, an avowed Maoist whose 1972 dismissal from Stanford University for an anti-Vietnam War speech became a cause célèbre for academic freedom — and who wrote books on a wide range of subjects in the decades that followed, including one credited with helping to improve the ecology of New York Harbor — died May 19 at his home in El Cerrito, California, near Berkeley. He was 90.

The cause was corticobasal degeneration, a rare brain disease, said his daughter Karen Franklin.

Dr. Franklin was a tenured professor of English and the author of three scholarly books on Herman Melville when he became radicalized during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. This process accelerated after he spent a year in France, where he and his wife, Jane Franklin, met Vietnamese refugees whose relatives had been killed by U.S. forces.

“When we returned to this country, we were Marxist-Leninists and we recognized the need for a revolutionary force in the United States,” Dr. Franklin told the New York Times in 1972.

His radical left-wing politics, which went as far as condoning violence, reflected the extreme currents that permeated the country and culture of the time – a mixture of revolutionary theatricality and real threat.

Back at Stanford, he and his wife helped found a group called the Peninsula Red Guard. Dr. Franklin was also a member of the central committee of Venceremos, a local organization that promoted armed self-defense and the overthrow of the government.

During the Stanford campus riots of February 1971, Dr. Franklin urged students to shut down “the most obvious war machine”: the Stanford Computation Center, which was believed to be conducting war-related work. A mob broke into the building and cut off the power.

At the urging of university president Richard W. Lyman, a faculty council voted to fire him for inciting violence.

Dr. Franklin responded by defiantly holding a press conference with his wife brandishing an unloaded M1 carbine rifle to demonstrate that “that is where the political power comes from,” he proclaimed, quoting a Mao Zedong quote.

His firing was the first firing of a tenured professor at a major university since the McCarthy era and sparked a national debate about academic freedom. Alan M. Dershowitz, then a young civil rights lawyer spending a year at Stanford, argued that Dr. Franklin’s speech to students was protected by the First Amendment. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling condemned what he called a “serious blow to free speech.”

The New York Times editorial board disagreed. “His behavior was cowardly and irresponsible. He manipulated students, endangered their own safety and harmed their future careers,” the Times editorial said. “He turned vulnerable young men and women into pawns while the professor, the instigator, sought immunity behind the shield of his tenure.”

Dr. Franklin later sued Stanford for back pay and reinstatement, but the California courts upheld the university’s decision.

He was blacklisted for three years and rejected by “hundreds of colleges,” he wrote in his 2018 memoir, “Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War.”

In 1975, he was finally hired by Rutgers University in Newark, where a decade later he was named the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies. He remained at Rutgers University until his retirement in 2016, publishing on a wide range of topics.

Vietnam was a recurring theme. In 1992, in “MIA: Or Mythmaking in America,” Dr. Franklin examined the widespread and false belief that U.S. soldiers were still being held captive in Indochina. It was a myth, he argued, propagated by Hollywood in films such as “Rambo II” and by the Reagan administration to prevent normalization of relations with communist Vietnam.

“Many Americans still refuse to confront the origins and terrible legacy of the Vietnam War and take comfort in legends,” Todd Gitlin wrote of Dr. Franklin’s book in the Times Book Review. “Reading his account leaves you wondering what is really missing in Vietnam.”

Dr. Franklin had a lifelong interest in science fiction and how its ostensibly pulp themes formed the core of American culture. He wrote a book on the work of Robert A. Heinlein and another on how canonical 19th-century authors such as Poe and Hawthorne engaged with science fiction. In 1992, he was guest curator of an exhibition on Star Trek at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

Long after becoming actively involved in radical politics, he became a saltwater angler off the coast of New Jersey. His interest culminated in a book about menhaden, an important fish in the coastal food chain, The Most Important Fish in the Sea (2007).

The book raised awareness of the commercial overfishing of menhaden for fertilizer and animal feed, prompting the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to impose the first-ever catch limits in 2012. These limits were credited with triggering the recovery of the menhaden population along the Atlantic coast and the return of the whales that feed on the fish to New York Harbor.

Howard Bruce Franklin was born on February 28, 1934, in Brooklyn, the only child of Robert Franklin, who worked low-paying jobs on Wall Street, and Florence (Cohen) Franklin, who worked as a fashion illustrator for newspaper advertisements.

Bruce, as he was known, was the first in his family to go to college when he won a scholarship to Amherst. There he felt alienated from his largely privileged fellow students. “I despised them from the crew cut to the sole of their white bucks, and hated above all the smug tweediness in between,” he once told a group of college teachers.

After graduating with honors in 1955, he worked as a mate on tugboats in New York Harbor. In 1956, he married Jane Ferrebee Morgan, who had grown up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina and worked in the United Nations Information Department.

Dr. Franklin served for three years in the Air Force as a navigator and squadron intelligence officer in the Strategic Air Command.

He was accepted into Stanford’s Ph.D. program in English, received his degree in 1961, and was hired as an assistant professor of English and American literature. His first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology, was published in 1963 and remained in print for decades.

At the time, he considered himself a conventional Democrat and volunteered for Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign in 1964.

But America’s growing involvement in Vietnam changed all that. In 1966, Dr. Franklin co-initiated an unsuccessful, nationally sensational campaign to shut down a napalm factory in San Francisco Bay.

He called himself a revolutionary, a word he defined, according to Time magazine, as “someone who believes that the rich who rule the country should be overthrown and that the poor and workers should rule the country.” In 1972, the year he was fired from Stanford, he published The Essential Stalin: Major Theoretical Writings, 1905-1952.

In an interview with The Times that same month, Dr. Franklin denied hiding Mr. Beaty but praised the violence that led to his escape.

“We believe that most people in prison should not be there, that bank robbery is not a crime, nor is drug possession,” he said. “And we believe that inmates should be released by any means necessary.”

Several members of Venceremos were convicted of murder, but the charges against Dr. Franklin were dropped.

“My father was able to prove that he was not at the location Ronald Beaty said he was,” said his daughter Karen.

In addition to Mrs. Franklin, a forensic psychologist, Dr. Franklin is survived by another daughter, Gretchen Franklin, a criminal defense attorney; a son, Robert, a physician; and six grandchildren. His wife, who wrote books on Cuba-US relations and led educational tours to Cuba, died in 2023 after 67 years of marriage.

Karen Franklin said she never asked her father if he regretted his rhetoric about violently overthrowing the government. “I don’t think he considered himself a Maoist or a Stalinist anymore,” she said. “He was part of a movement that was national and international in the ’60s and ’70s. He was a leader of that movement; he was also swept up in that movement, and when the movement ended, his politics became more moderate.”