here to enact anew the chief function of culture and humanism, to bring man again into communication with man. Along with John Crowe Ransom and Lionel Trilling, in 1948, Matthiessen was one of the founders of the Kenyon School of English. Politics Matthiessen's politics were left-wing and socialist. Already financially secure, he donated an inheritance he received in the late 1940s to his friend, Marxist economist Paul Sweezy. Sweezy used the money, totalling almost $15,000, to found a new journal, which became the Monthly Review. On the Harvard campus, Matthiessen was a visible and active supporter of progressive causes. In May 1940 he was elected president of the Harvard Teachers Union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor. The Harvard Crimson reported his inaugural address in which Matthiessen quoted the campus union's constitution: "In affiliating with the organized labor movement, we express our desire to contribute to and receive support from this powerful progressive force; to reduce the segregation of teachers from the rest of the workers ...and increase thereby the sense of common purpose among them; and in particular to cooperate in this field in the advancement of education and resistance to all reaction." Matthiessen seconded the nomination of the Progressive Party presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, at the party's convention in Philadelphia in 1948. Reflective of the emerging McCarthyism surveillance of left-wing university academics, he was mentioned as an activist in Boston area so-called "Communist front groups" by Herbert Philbrick. Personal life Matthiessen was known to his friends as "Matty". As a gay man in the 1930s and 1940s, he chose to remain in the closet throughout his professional career, if not in his personal life – although traces of homoerotic concern are apparent in his writings. In 2009, a statement from Harvard University said that Matthiessen "stands out as an unusual example of a gay man who lived his sexuality as an 'open secret' in the mid-20th century." He had a two-decade-long romantic relationship with the painter Russell Cheney, twenty years his senior. Like Matthiessen's family, Cheney's was prominent in business, being among America's leading silk producers. In a 1925 letter to Cheney, Matthiessen wrote about trusting friends with the knowledge of their relationship, rather than the world at large; in planning to spend his life with Cheney, Matthiessen went as far as asking his cohort in the Yale secret society Skull and Bones to approve of