H. Bruce Franklin, Scholar Who Embraced Radical Politics, Dies at 90

H. Bruce Franklin, a self-professed Maoist whose firing by Stanford University in 1972 over an anti-Vietnam War speech became a cause célèbre of academic freedom — and who in the ensuing decades wrote books on eclectic topics, including one credited with helping to improve the ecology of New York Harbor — died on May 19 at his home in El Cerrito, Calif., near Berkeley He was 90.

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

Dr. Franklin was a tenured English professor and the author of three scholarly books about Herman Melville when he became radicalized in the 1960s over the Vietnam War, a process that 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 came back to this country, we were Marxist Leninists and we saw the need for a revolutionary force in the United States,” Dr. Franklin told The New York Times in 1972.

His far-left politics, to the point of endorsing violence, mirrored extreme currents running through the country and the culture in that era, a mix of revolutionary theatrics and genuine threat.

Back at Stanford, he and his wife helped form 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.