democracy. He strongly opposed direct democracy, however, particularly the use and misuse of referendums, as leading to totalitarianism. He stressed the necessity for maintaining the rule of law, supplemented by a strong infrastructure of civil institutions, and was highly suspicious of popular grass-roots movements. Harvard University: 1936–1941 Friedrich was appointed Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1936. Friedrich's main areas of thought were the problems of leadership and bureaucracy in government, public administration, and comparative political institutions. An extremely popular lecturer, Friedrich also wrote prolifically, producing 31 volumes on political history, government, and philosophy and editing another 22 (then the second most in Harvard's history). In the 1930s, Professor Friedrich also played a leading role, with one of his students, the then-unknown David Riesman, by his side, in efforts to help Jewish scholars, lawyers, and journalists who were fleeing Nazi Germany and other Fascist regimes resettle in the United States. He persuaded one of them, the pianist Rudolf Serkin, to give a concert at his farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, an event which led to the establishment of the Marlboro Music Festival. Friedrich, who was arguably the most knowledgeable scholar in his field (of German Constitutional history) of his time, was endowed with a healthy self-regard. Indeed, some of his colleagues at Harvard regarded him as a "somewhat hubristic person who was overly confident of his own abilities." World War II and Cold War: 1941–1984 Friedrich had joined the ranks of Harvard scholars who despised communist attempts to establish a classless society. In 1939 Friedrich first published a barrage of communism, and in the course of World War II Friedrich developed fierce convictions on the Soviet Union. He regarded the Soviet Union as the mortal enemy of democracies. Friedrich maintained that by abolishing all separation of power in the quest for social utopia the Soviet Union would enslave the entire world. In Friedrich's mind, mass politics had to be reigned in by responsible elites and constitutional democracy. Friedrich was determined to put Harvard University into the service of the democratic state and in 1946 he joined Talcott Parsons, Edward S. Mason, Edwin O. Reischauer and other Harvard faculty members to design a new academic program with courses in international economics, diplomacy, and state administration. Friedrich taught the first program on China and Japan, as well as Korea and the Philippines, two nations that had emerged out of the Japanese empire.