The American Way
American physicists worked and spent their way out of the Depression. There were close approximations to Sinclair Lewis's Doctor Arrowsmith among them—men eager to maximize overwork, rough around the edges (Arrowsmith did not know "a symphony from a savory"), thoroughly dedicated to their science,
[91] Hull, RSI, 6 (1935), 377–8.
[92] Barton, reporting on the "Conference on Applied Physics," 14 Dec 1934, under the auspices of AIP and NRC, in RSI, 6 (1935), 30; Hull, ibid., 383.
[93] Quotes from, resp., Barton, RSI, 5 (Aug 1934), 263, and RSI, 6 (1935), 32, the last reporting the views of O.E. Buckeley, director of research at Bell Labs, and Saul Dushman of GE; Hull, RSI, 6 (1935), 378–80.
their careers, and, at second remove, their neighbors. Harold C. Urey, a student of G.N. Lewis's, was one of the most successful of these men. His great discovery of heavy water, made in 1932 after much hard work by himself and selfless colleagues, immediately found application in physics and chemistry, and, what had greater social value, biology; it also lifted the spirits of beleaguered scientists and won Urey a Nobel prize. In 1937, in an address at the dedication of a new building at the Mellon Institute for Technological Research, Urey voiced Arrowsmith's creed: "We wish to abolish drudgery, discomfort and want from the lives of men and bring them pleasure, comfort, leisure and beauty. . . . The results of our work completely outdistance our dreams. . . . You may bury our bodies where you will, our epitaphs are written in our scientific journals, our monuments are the industries which we build, which without our magic touch would never be."[94]
One of Lawrence's most brilliant students of the Depression years, Robert Wilson, a midwesterner like Arrowsmith (and Lawrence), fed his fancy with the heroics of Lewis's doctor when riding the range in Wyoming. Arrived at Berkeley, he dismounted to find his ideal in charge of a radiation laboratory.[95] During his early years at Berkeley, Lawrence did have many of Arrowsmith's qualities. Like the doctor, he had two passions, one science, the other the daughter of a physician on the faculty at Yale. "I have two consuming loves," he wrote his great friend Donald Cooksey in the summer of 1931, "Molly and research!" "I am so badly (or goodly) in love that at times it is positively painful." And, like Arrowsmith, Lawrence was boyish and unsophisticated, open in his enthusiasms, in a word—the word was Oppenheimer's—"unspoiled." He believed that to start work was to begin to improve, and that more science, not less, would liberate from psychological as well as economic depression. He labored hard on these principles, so hard that he often fell a victim to severe colds, which increased in frequency in step with the growth of his laboratory.[96] As Arrowsmith discovered, fulfilling one's scientific
[94] S. Lewis, Arrowsmith , quote from chap. 39; Urey, RSI, 8 (1937), 226–7. On Arrowsmith as the American scientific hero see Rosenberg, No other gods , 128–31.
[95] Wilson in Holton, Twentieth cent. , 468–9, 471.
[96] Lawrence to Cooksey, 17 Jul [1931] (4/19), and to Tuve, 27 Aug 1931 (MAT, 8); Lawrence to Beams, 21 Nov 1931 (2/26) and to Poillon, 20 May 1940, and Cooksey to Poillon, 6 June 1940 (15/18), on colds; Oppenheimer to FrancisFerguson, 14 Nov 1926, in Smith and Weiner, Oppenheimer , 100; Lawrence to Hedrick, 2 June 1938 (19/35), re moratorium.
ambitions according to the highest standards while running a large research institution constantly in need of money may not be possible. Lewis's doctor hero cleared his conscience by an unrealistic escape to a small workplace in the wilderness; Berkeley's Lawrence cut corners, lost innocence, and built the largest laboratory for nuclear science in the world.
Arrowsmith's ferocious pace in pursuit of truth, his almost athletic performances in the laboratory, were characteristically American. The "feverish exploration for the secrets of matter's composition" (as Science Service described research in nuclear physics in 1934) impressed European observers of science in the United States. Would you care to think more about it, Rudolf Peierls wrote Hans Bethe about a joint paper, "or do you insist on publishing in American tempo?" Haste makes waste. Bethe had become almost a legend for his error-free calculations. But in a recent paper he had made two numerical mistakes in one single table. "Is that America," Peierls asked, "or the automobile?"[97]
As American as the fast pace was the big machine. Already before the war, the size and variety of equipment in American physics institutes "made [a European's] mouth water."[98] It appeared to Franz Simon, who surveyed facilities for low-temperature research in the United States in 1932, that "Americans seem to work very well, only they obviously insist on making everything as big as possible." A few years later, Paul Capron of the University of Louvain expressed perfectly the standard impression made on Continentals by the research facilities in the United States: "In Princeton as in Columbia University, I was most amazed by the richness of the laboratory. . . . [At MIT] I saw the most extraordinary technics [i.e., instrumentation]." He returned to Belgium, inspired by the American spirit, the "constructive civilization of 'go ahead.'"[99] From machine worship
[97] Science service , ca. March 1934, in Cockburn and Ellyard, Oliphant , 55; Peierls to Bethe, 25 Aug 1936 (HAB/3).
[98] W.E. Ayrton (1904), quoted in Forman, Heilbron, and Weart, 82; Manegold, Universität , 116–47.
[99] K. Mendelssohn to Silva Critescu, 11 Nov 1932, reporting Simon's observations (Mendelssohn P); Capron, "Report," 2, 5.
there is but a step to materialism, the last and heaviest ingredient in the European depreciation of American culture. A good American answer to this stale charge came from an immigrant inventor, Michael Pupin, who accepted it, played with it, gloried in it. What we do in America, he said, results from close study of nature, which enhances the spirit; and nature happens to be a machine. "The [artificial] machine is the visible evidence of the close union between man and the spirit of the eternal truth which guides the subtle hand of nature."[100]
The American physicist projected his image at home with the willing help of the press. The collaboration, which was first struck just after the war with Science Service and with the coverage of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1922, entered a new stage in April 1934, with the formation of the National Association of Science Writers and the call from the podium of the American Physical Society for propaganda for physics. One of the leaders of the writers' association was David Dietz, the science editor for the Scripps-Howard newspapers. Dietz volunteered the help of his organization in "selling physics to the public," when, at a conference on applied science held late in 1934, Saul Dushman of GE expressed the hope that the selling "would be done without impairing the dignity of science." In 1935, at a conference on industrial physics in Pittsburgh, Dietz observed that the only way to get $50 million a year from the government—$50 million being the loss in research money owing to the Depression, according to the American Institute of Physics—was to work on public opinion. "Your best allies in creating public support for science are the newspapers," Dietz said. "There is a new understanding today between the world of science and the newspaper world."[101] The director of Science Service , Watson Davis, took the same line. Nowadays, he said, in a speech in February 1936, science writers follow science with the same attentiveness and understanding that sports reporters lavish on football. Their relation is symbiotic: the scientist reveals, the
[100] Pupin, Scribner's, 87 (1930), 136.
[101] Foote, RSI, 5 (1934), 63; Barton, RSI, 6 (1935), 35, quoting Dietz and Dushman; Dietz, Science, 85 (1937), 108, on the history of relations between science and the press.
reporter "detechnicalizes." "These essentially changed attitudes on the part of the press and the world of science are among the most encouraging signs of our times." No fewer than sixteen reporters showed up at the AAAS meeting in December 1935. That suited the science lobby perfectly. Austin Clark, the press director of the AAAS echoed Dietz: "We must all work together in order that the press may have an abundance of suitable material to present to the public."[102] It remained only to take the step, which would have been anathema to Arrowsmith, of fusing business with research. This Maurice Holland, the director of the Division of Engineering and Industrial Research of the NRC, did not disdain to do. "There seems to be some connection between selling and science—I, for one, believe they are brothers under the skin."[103]
At first Arrowsmith-Lawrence drew back from selling, in public at least. "We are not interested in publicity," he wrote a would-be reporter in 1934. In this policy he had been encouraged by a newspaper report that he was trying to transmute base metal into gold and by Molly, who thought it "unfortunate that the Research Council [i.e., Corporation] etc. have demanded so much publicity on your work."[104] But Lawrence could not long affect this other-wordly attitude. When the president of the University asked him to talk to the Rotary Club of Berkeley, and to furnish a copy "in order that we may use it for publicity in the newspapers of the state," Lawrence could only reply that he would be "more than glad to do so." He became expert in dealing with Dietz and company; and his benefactors came to request that he write press releases to satisfy the curiosity of the newspapers. An example of his handiwork, anent a grant from the National Advisory Cancer Council, which dispensed federal money: "[The] strikingly rapid
[102] Resp., Dietz, RSI, 7 (1936), 5; Davis, Vital speeches, 2 (1936), 361; and Clark, Science, 81 (20 Mar 1935), 316. Cf. Dietz, Science, 85 (1937), 112.
[103] Holland, in RSI, 6 (1935), 36. Cf. Carter, Am. schol., 45 (1975/76), 780.
[104] Lawrence to Tuve, 10 Nov 1931 (MAT, 3), and to Hugh Kitchen, 1 Feb 1934 (10/6); Molly Blumer to Lawrence, 8 Nov [1931] (10/38), inspired by Zinnser, Science, 74 (23 Oct 1931), 402: "Institutional rivalry, bidding for support, has had a tendency to foster the submission of results to public and inexpert applause before they have been passed upon in the forum of technical criticism." Tuve and Urey also thought themselves victims of an irresponsible press; Tuve to Hafstad, 4 Jan 1931 (MAT, 8) and Brickwedde to Urey, 12 Dec 1931 (Urey P, 1).
development of these powerful new weapons in the war on cancer [he meant cyclotrons] is a splendid example of the fruitfulness of the active interest and support of the government in medical research [the government had had nothing directly to do with financing cyclotrons], for it may be truly said that the National Advisory Cancer Council has greatly accelerated the day in our generation when countless cancer sufferers may be benefitted by these new radiations."[105] The fallen Doctor Arrowsmith himself became a journalistic object, attaining the frontispiece of Time in 1937 and the insides of Scientific American in 1940.[106]