Archives West Finding Aid

Alex Gottfried was a University of Washington professor of political science, a civil liberties leader, an antiwar activist, and an expert on Chicago’s machine politics. Alex Gottfried was born in Also Zsolca, a village in Hungary, on October 23, 1919, the youngest son of David Gottfried and Charlotte Braun. He had three siblings: Joseph, Louis, and Lillie. He immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, with his mother and sister, joining his father and brothers in Chicago where the family settled. With the adults in his family often unemployed and on relief during the Great Depression, Dr. Gottfried worked continuously from an early age, often at several jobs, including work in a hat factory, as a stevedore and mover, clothing model, and movie theater usher. Dr. Gottfried attended Chicago Teachers College, from which he graduated in 1941 with an undergraduate degree in education. He met Betty Sue Davidson, of Galveston, Texas, in the spring in 1942 and they were married on May 9, 1943. Gottfried joined the United States Army Air Corps, 54th Fighter Group, in 1942 and rose to the rank of major. He served in the Civil Affairs Division for the U.S. military government established in occupied Germany, where, at age 26, he was in charge of “de-Nazification” for all schools, hospitals, churches, and voluntary organizations in Bavaria. After his discharge from the military, Gottfried took advantage of the G.I. Bill and entered the University of Chicago, from which he received a Master’s degree in 1948 and a PhD in Political Science in 1952. Gottfried joined the political science faculty of the University of Washington in 1950, where he taught until his retirement in 1982. Dr. Gottfried was the author of Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership, published by the University of Washington Press in 1962, which became a primary text for the study of American “machine politics.” He was also a contributor to The Nation, The Progressive, and Liberation magazines, as well as scholarly publications such as Western Political Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, writing on topics ranging from electoral politics to civil rights and the peace movement, right wing movements, psychosomatic illnesses in political leaders, and studies of political novels, co-authoring several of these articles with his wife, Sue Davidson, a writer, editor, and progressive political activist. He also combined his passion for literature and devotion to cinema with his expertise in politics to create the first course on politics and the novel taught in the United States and to sponsor the first series offered on political films at the University of Washington.

A self-described “nuclear pacifist,” Dr. Gottfried dated his opposition to all wars from the United States destruction of Hiroshima by an atom bomb, and this conviction remained an important element of his philosophic and political outlook. He was also a local leader in Seattle in the movement to end the war in Vietnam, and an active participant in and supporter of the local civil rights movement. He was a democratic socialist, but belonged to no party. His central political concern and arena of political activity, however, was civil liberties. In the early 1950s he joined what was then the Seattle, later, the Washington State, affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union. He was repeatedly elected to the Board of Directors of the Washington affiliate, serving terms totaling 21 years, between 1961 and 1988. On the Board of Directors, he was a gadfly who pushed the organization to broaden its definition of civil liberties, including opposing the military draft and marijuana prohibition. In 1988, the ACLU of Washington presented Dr. Gottfried with its highest honor, the William O. Douglas award, “in recognition of outstanding contributions to the cause of civil liberties and freedom.” Dr. Gottfried was also the first member of the ACLU’s “Charter Life Member” program. Other organizations in which he served included the national ACLU and the National Committee to End Repressive Legislation (whose boards he served on), Congress of Racial Equality, Group Health Cooperative of Washington State, the American Political Science Association and Western Political Science Association, and Caucus for New Political Science. He spoke frequently on domestic and international politics and civil liberties to community groups, as well as on local television and radio. A talented athlete and amateur actor, Dr. Gottfried excelled in basketball and tennis, which he played in high school, college, and, later, on U.S. military teams. While attending Chicago Teachers’ College, he founded and performed in the “Green Lyres,” an all-male singing and dancing comedy troupe; in the 1950s he had substantial roles in plays performed at Seattle’s Cirque Theater, a semi-professional playhouse. Alex Gottfried died on March 18, 2014, in Renton, Washington at the age of 94.

Sources: New York Times Obituary and University of Washington Department of Political Science website, "Passing of Alex Gottfried"