PART FIVE
ONWARD AS TO WAR

20
Onward as to War

With something approaching acclaim, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term by the Democratic convention in Chicago the night of July 17, 1940. There remained only his decision as to his running mate. That same morning Robert Maynard Hutchins phoned his friend Harold Ickes—in town for the convention—and asked to see him. "To my surprise," the secretary of the interior wrote in his diary that night, "he suggested that either he or I ought to be nominated for Vice-President. He had come from the Chicago Club where he had been talking the matter over with a group of friends and apparently something in the way of a boom had been started for him. I laughingly told him that Jane"—Mrs. Ickes—"was managing my own campaign for Vice-President and I agreed with him that either one of us would make the kind of candidate the situation required. I had not thought of Hutchins in connection with the Vice-Presidency and I did not think that at any stage he was available because he had no record in public life, and the booms of others, who had a considerable following in the Democratic party, had gone too far. However, I was bound to say to Jane, and to admit to myself, that Hutchins makes an ideal candidate. He is highly intelligent, speaks well, is young and highly personable. I could think of nothing better than having Hutchins trail Willkie"—the Republican presidential nominee—"around the country. . . .

"What Hutchins really had come to see me about was to enlist my support for his own candidacy. When he discovered what had been running in our minds, he offered to do anything he could in my support. I told him that I would be perfectly satisfied if he were nominated and, in the end, we agreed to team up. He volunteered to have some of his friends send telegrams to the President in my behalf and, personally, he sent one to [presidential intimate] Tom Corcoran, although that could not do any possible

good. He volunteered once or twice to telegraph directly to the President, but I asked him not to do that. It was on this same day that I sent the following telegram to the President:

Chicago, July 18, 1940

PERSONAL

STRAIGHT MESSAGE

The President

The White House

Washington, D.C.

I doubt whether anyone is happier over the action of the convention last night than I and my warmest regards and congratulations go to you. I do not know whether you have considered the advisability of selecting as Vice-Presidential candidate a man like Robert M. Hutchins. He is well located geographically, is a liberal and one of the most facile and forceful speakers in the country. It might appeal to the imagination of the people to give them a new and attractive person like Hutchins and I know of no one better able to take care of himself in a free-for-all fight with Willkie. I am inclined to think that he would be the strongest man we could name. May I say also that if Hutchins does not appeal to you, I would feel honored to be considered as your running mate. . . . However, you know better than I whether I am available and I need not tell you that, whatever your decision may be, the fact that you are the head of the ticket is all that is necessary to assure it of my loyal support.

Harold I. Ickes

"I sincerely believed what I said in this telegram about Hutchins. I also believed that I had some availability." The next morning—the day of the vice-presidential nomination—Ickes had several visitors, among them Hutchins, who "again offered to telegraph the President. I said that it was too late and I showed him a copy of the telegram that I had sent the afternoon before." Just then a call came through to Ickes from "Pa" Watson, the president's secretary in Washington. Watson said that "considering the farm vote, the labor vote, and the foreign situation, the President thought Henry Wallace would make the strongest candidate." "Obviously, this was the President's indirect reply to my telegram of the afternoon before in which I had suggested either Hutchins or myself for the Vice-Presidency. He didn't like to turn me down himself, but something had to be said to me. This was the only communication, direct or indirect, that I had from the White House during my days in Chicago."^[1]

So much for Hutchins' haughty I-am-not-interested-in-public-life. He wasn't interested in public life—except at the top. Often elected and never

a candidate, this once he abandoned his above-it-all posture and made a lunge at the brass ring in clumsy competition with the seasoned lungers of American party politics. His one-day campaign was not generally known—none of the "group of friends" at the Chicago Club ever spoke up—until the Ickes diaries were published in 1954.

What was known, of course, was that admirers of his had here and there been touting him for the presidency since 1936 (when columnist Dorothy Thompson proposed him against Landon and Roosevelt).^[2] Yale men William Benton and Thornton Wilder were confident that he would one day occupy the White House to the greater glory of Yale.^[3] Harvard man Walter Lippmann (to whom Hutchins offered a professorship) admired him ever more fervently. New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott, taking a long, easy look in the Roosevelt spring of 1940, publicly "nominated" him for president in 1944.^[4] (FDR was a third-term shoo-in, and it was unthinkable that he would run a fourth time.)

The Hutchins boosters in 1940 included two very different men of very different tastes, backgrounds, and interests, with this much in common: social worker Harry Hopkins (Roosevelt's secretary of commerce, confidant and agent) and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis (the one-time husband of booster Dorothy Thompson) were both of them political outsiders, long, lean, sardonic men whose irrepressibly independent views of men and affairs made both of them a great gallery of friends and enemies. Neither of them had the savvy of a political pro, and Lewis had none of the external restraints that Hopkins had in Washington. In the early spring of 1940 the wild and wooly novelist visited Chicago and after two or three agreeable meetings with Hutchins informed his Chicago acquaintances that he was going to go to Washington and push his new friend for the vice-presidency. Bill Benton, who also envisioned Hutchins as FDR's successor, heard of Lewis's scheme and reacted prophylactically. Knowing Washington, Benton knew that Lewis would do more harm than good "wandering around town on any such mission." He asked Lewis to let him go along, and Lewis agreed. "We talked to many of the leading intellectuals in Washington," Benton recalled later. "I suppose most of them were too incredulous to let us know how incredulous they were. The conversation I most vividly remember was the one with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. He said to me flatly, 'Your friend Hutchins could have had the vice-presidential nomination of the Democratic party for the asking, if he had accepted the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission when Roosevelt offered it to him at the time I resigned the chairmanship to go onto the Supreme Court. But by turning it down, he forfeited his chance.'

"There may have been a great deal to this," Benton went on, "but that was not the end of the matter. Later, while the 1940 Democratic Convention was getting under way at Chicago, Harry Hopkins called on Hutchins at his home on the University of Chicago campus. The oldest Hutchins child, Franja, was then about fifteen. She opened the door of her home, peered up, saw Hopkins standing there and said to him: 'Who are you and what do you want?' Hopkins replied: 'I am Harry Hopkins and I have come to offer your father the vice-presidential nomination of the Democratic party.' Hopkins and Hutchins were on the telephone that night with Roosevelt. What was said? I don't know. But there must have been something in the wind concerning the vice-presidency, since important elements at the 1940 Democratic Convention were uneasy and resentful about the nomination going to Henry Wallace."^[5]

Hopkins, like Ickes, was a radical reformer. Neither man (nor, for that matter, Henry A. Wallace) would have been likely to be in any president's cabinet except Franklin Roosevelt's. They came to dislike each other intensely early in the New Deal days, since they found themselves treading on one another's territorial toes, Ickes as head of the Public Works Administration, Hopkins as head of the Works Progress Administration. But they both saw in Hutchins a kindred outsider spirit who had the makings (as neither of them had) of a spectacular figure on the national scene. Each was moved by a passionate desire to see the New Deal perpetuated after Roosevelt's time; each saw in the younger Hutchins the promise for the future.

Like the "group of friends at the Chicago Club" the morning Hutchins called on Ickes, none of the three participants in the telephone conversation between Hutchins' house and the White House ever spoke publicly about it—except that one of them must have told Benton that it took place. One thing that neither Hopkins nor Roosevelt—nor Ickes—seems to have known was that Hutchins wouldn't have done at all. Not at all. Not in July of 1940.

By July of 1940, the real war had begun; the Germans invaded Norway and Denmark on April 9, France and the Low Countries a month later; the British were driven from Dunkirk in early June; Italy attacked a collapsing France (and inspired Roosevelt's "stab in the back" speech) on June 10, and Paris fell on June 12. Taking office as prime minister the day the Blitzkrieg struck at France, Winston Churchill promised his countrymen "blood, toil, tears, and sweat," but the day Great Britain's 335,000-man expeditionary force evacuated Dunkirk he promised them something more, something that was widely overlooked in his great "we shall fight on the beaches" oration: "And even if, which I do not for a moment believe,

this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old."

Without congressional sanction Roosevelt at once replied, in a public address, that "in our American unity . . . we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation." As it was Churchill's first direct appeal for American aid, so it was Roosevelt's first formal offer of it.

Ickes and Hopkins in Washington were over their ears in the national and international crises of the day. Boosting Hutchins for the vice-presidential nomination, they were both of them guilty (or, more precisely, innocent) of having paid no attention to his recent antics out there in the Chicago wilderness. Had they done so, or taken the time to talk to him, they would have discovered why he wouldn't have done at all. For Hutch-ins opposed American intervention in the war in Europe and had made his opposition known publicly as early as June of 1940—a month before the Democratic convention. In a commencement address, under the title, "What Shall We Defend?" he amplified the view he had been expressing informally, that the outcome of the war, whoever won, would be a disaster for democracy.^[6] The address made modest national headlines, though it could not, obviously, have come to the attention of Ickes or Hopkins. They both supported the president's pro-allied program to the hilt, and they both knew him well enough to know that he would have no truck with anyone who opposed it. In the succeeding months Franklin Roosevelt would push ever more stridently for "all measures short of war," and Robert Hutchins would pull ever more strenuously in the other direction. "Dear Bob" and "Dear Mr. President" would never again, after the 1940 convention, see each other or communicate directly or indirectly.

On September 7, 1939, six days after the German invasion of Poland, Hutchins wrote his friend John U. Nef, the Chicago economist, "The war has got me down. I wish I could think either that it would be short or that we could stay out of it. I think it will be long, and that though we could stay out of it, we are not likely to. I remember 1914 with horror and 1917 with something worse. I don't see that after the war is over, though Hitler will be gone, the actions of the French and English governments will be any more enlightened than they were after the last war." Two years later, in one of his antiwar speeches: "Before 1917 the country had serious problems. The war settled none of them and produced some new ones we had never dreamed of. From 1919 to 1929 we paid no attention to these problems, or anything else, except the price of stocks. From 1929 to 1939 we thought of nothing but these problems. We applied a whole pharmaco-

paeia of desperate remedies. . . . But there was little fundamental improvement. . . . This, then, is the spectacle of a country with appalling problems, many of them resulting from the last war, about to plunge into another in the hope of ending its troubles that way. In the life of individuals this method of solving problems is known as suicide."^[7]

In 1937 President Roosevelt's "quarantine the aggressors" speech—directed against the Japanese attack on China—aroused no great interest in the country. The rise of Nazism and its successive atrocities, including its 1938 annexation of Austria and occupation of the Czech Sudetenland, likewise left Americans unmoved; even after the beginning of the war in Europe a mere 8.9 percent were willing to supply England, France, and Poland while refusing matériel to Germany. (37.5 percent were willing to sell matériel of all sorts to all comers, 30 percent wanted nothing whatever to do with any warring country, and only 14.7 percent were willing to go to war if the allies should be losing.)

Many of the country's most influential Jews, proud of being assimilated to the secular American life, were shy of supporting their coreligionists in Germany, fearful of intensifying anti-Semitism by being politically conspicuous and supporting unpopular, or even merely controversial, causes. In 1939 a Jewish donor asked Hutchins to try to persuade Felix Frankfurter not to accept Roosevelt's appointment of him to the Supreme Court. Hutchins demurred, saying that such intercession would be improper and, besides, Professor Frankfurter would be a great justice. "I know this," said the donor, "but every time a Jew is appointed to a high post it feeds the fires of anti-Semitism."

There were Jews of that sort before Hitler, one of them one of the wealthiest men in America. "Let me," said Hutchins ten or twenty years after the event, "tell you about him so that you will understand how I became anti-Semitic. I was already anti-Gentile, but I didn't know I was anti-Semitic until the evening of December 31, 1932, at a New Year's Eve party I had to attend because it was given by a man who was reported, erroneously, to have some money left, and the University of Chicago needed money. In order to stay awake past my bedtime, I engaged one of our trustees in a conversation. He had money left, he was generous, and, what was more to the point, he was a leader of the Jewish community—a pushover for purposes of the conversation. I told him that for $250,000 I could make the University of Chicago the greatest university in history in ninety days. He said he thought that the money could be found—I always liked that 'found'—but how did I propose to bring the miracle to pass? I told him that I was a great student of modern European history and that President von Hindenburg could not avoid appointing Hitler chancellor of

Germany for more than another sixty days. (I turned out to be optimistic by thirty.) All I would need, if I could get started right away, would be another thirty days after that to hire every Jewish scholar in Germany—and get them for coffee and buns. The leader of the Jewish community said, 'Oh,' and then he said, 'Bob, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this country, and it's growing. The trouble is that there are too many Jews here now.' In the succeeding years before the war the University had to go into the open market and share the emigrés with the other leading institutions around the world."

A few weeks after the invasion of Poland in 1939 Harry Hopkins wrote his brother, "I believe that we can really keep out of it. Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win."^[8]

But the beginnings of the bitter division of the country between "isolation" and "intervention" were already detectable. Chester Bowles in New York, although he repudiated the idea of American isolation from the world, was among those who were already doing what they could to dampen the incipient war fever. On June 25, two weeks after the fall of France, his one-time advertising partner Benton wrote Hutchins from New York: "Chet Bowles is so steamed up over this problem of aid to the Allies that he'd like to see you take to the radio this week, go on record, address a speech either to the world . . . or to Winston Churchill announcing that millions of Americans are against any form of intervention whatsoever. . . . Chet and I privately agree that if England can and does hold out for one year, the U.S. will drift into this war. There isn't any leadership on the horizon to keep us out of it. Are we reflecting the hysteria to which we are exposed here in the East?"

But what about the "group of friends" assembled in his behalf at the Chicago Club the morning of the vice-presidential nomination? Surely they knew where Roosevelt stood and, after the 1940 commencement address (and just as surely some of them before it), where Hutchins stood. He may have appeared, at first blush, to have been only incidentally interested in the cosmic calamity of Europe. But there was no mistaking his attitude toward his country's involvement. "What Shall We Defend?" Democracy, said Roosevelt. Hardly, said Hutchins; reciting the painful injustices of American society, he argued that we were not prepared to defend democracy: "Precisely here lies our unpreparedness against the only enemy we may have to face. Such principles as we have are not different enough from Hitler's to make us very rugged in defending ours in preference to his. Moreover, we are not united and clear about such principles as we have. We are losing our moral principles. But the vestiges of

them remain to bother us and to interfere with a thoroughgoing commitment to immoral principles. Hence we are like confused, divided, ineffective Hitlers. In a contest between Hitler and people who are wondering why they shouldn't be Hitlers the finished product is bound to win."^[9] (Stylish prose, that; and, perhaps, a little slick.)

In November of 1940 Mr. Roosevelt was reelected by another colossal landslide, which he took to be something between an acceptance and an endorsement of his pro-allied position. By 1941 the country was sharply divided between the miscalled interventionists and the similarly miscalled isolationists. Each of the two camps was in fact a mélange of divided camps.

The interventionists, so called, included not only the Anglophilic socialites and intellectuals of the east coast (and elsewhere) but the admirers everywhere of the political, cultural, and economic institutions of England; east (and later west) coast residents farsightedly fearful of a victorious Axis attack on the western hemisphere; nearly all the country's Jews and their sympathizers; saber-rattling militarists; international financiers and industrialists with British ties; certainly tens of millions of disinterested freedom lovers and enemies of tyranny who believed that all "measures," "steps," and "aid short of war" to the democratic countries was a realistic program and not a catchphrase or a morally dubious scheme to help the victim up to (and only up to) the point where the helper might get hurt.

The "isolationists" were an even more heterogeneous crew, consisting of the country's few (but disproportionately noisy) Communists prior to Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union; the few (but likewise disproportionately noisy) doctrinaire pacifists both secular and religious; a considerable and influential number of Anglophobic enemies of empire and imperialism in the best American spirit; a tremendously influential assortment of across-the-board xenophobics like William Randolph Hearst; a considerable (but, under the circumstances, decreasingly influential) body of conservative, but anti-Nazi, admirers of Germany; some anti-British Irish; a handful (only a handful this time around) of descendants of German and Italian immigrants, actual immigration having come to a substantial halt in the early 1920s; a few secret Nazi agents; a more than embarrassing motley of "native-American" fascist, racist, and anti-Semitic elements overtly or covertly enthusiastic about Nazism; and tens of millions of genuinely neutralist Americans of purest patriotism who wanted no part of what Jefferson called "the broils of Europe," together with many liberal internationalists like Hutchins who all too clearly recalled the

failure of the First World War to make the world safe for democracy and saw war, not Germany or Nazism but war itself, as the scourge of liberty.

If "isolation" meant simply staying out of war, and no more than that, there was no doubt that most of the "interventionists" were, logically or illogically, isolationists right up to Pearl Harbor. And if "intervention" meant nothing more bellicose than material aid to the Allies there was no doubt that most of the "isolationists" were interventionists. But the opposition of the American people to actual military involvement, more than 85 percent at the beginning of the war, never fell below 70 percent prior to Pearl Harbor, right through the Roosevelt success in obtaining from Congress piecemeal repeal of the U.S. Neutrality Act and its arms embargo provisions, the leasing of overage destroyers to Britain, the arming of U.S. merchant ships, the adoption of peacetime conscription, and the decisive passage of Lend-Lease in March of 1941. (Even congressional resistance to the president was stiffening before Pearl Harbor. In August the House passed the draft-extension bill by a single vote, and in November more congressmen voted against neutrality revision than had voted against Lend-Lease in March.)

Thus the isolationist amalgam, though it contained more disparate, and even malodorous, elements than the interventionist, was much more representative of the country. Its spearhead organization was the America First Committee, which was never able to rid itself of its "pro-Nazi" tailcoaters and its reactionary image, though its membership included many distinguished libertarians such as Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation , Amos Pinchot of Pennsylvania, the economist John T. Flynn, and Vice-president William Benton of the University of Chicago, Hutchins' Yale classmate and friend. (Benton's formidable schoolmarm mother, who had home-steaded in the northwest, roundly disapproved of her son's isolationism and told him so: "There is nothing creditable in failing to give the last full measure of devotion to your country when her life is at stake. . . . You have put yourself in a very ugly position because of the America First connection. . . . I fear it is a case of Old Dog Tray getting into bad company. I shall always consider Robert Hutchins responsible for that.")^[10]

So it went, as the frenzy mounted and the lines were more sharply drawn with each day's dire reports from across the sea. In his diary entry of April 12, 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes wrote of a visit from his and Hutchins' old friend Charles E. Merriam. (A prominent Roosevelt advisor, Merriam was a moderate interventionist.) "I asked him," Ickes wrote, "if he could explain Bob Hutchins' late speeches. They have sounded to me like those of an appeaser. . . . Merriam and I found that our view with

respect to Hutchins coincided. We think that his very just resentment over the manner in which the Administration has treated him, plus political ambition, has led him to take the stand that he has. However, on the other side, Hutchins has jeopardized the endowment drive [of the University of Chicago] next fall. Merriam thought that he was looking for a large sum of money from Marshall Field, and Field is distinctly on the other side. . . . The Rockefellers are also against him on this issue."^[11]

So Ickes and Merriam could believe that so low a consideration as political ambition or personal grudge was enough to determine the position of the otherwise admirable Hutchins on the issue of war and peace. The "however, on the other side" gave them away, with their recognition that this politically ambitious cynic in his willingness to jeopardize the endowment drive he headed, was prepared to sacrifice his career to principle. (In 1941 John Gunther, in his notes for Inside U.S.A . recorded his impression that Hutchins might be the isolationists' candidate for president in 1944.)^[12]

Hutchins was widely identified with the America First Committee, although he never spoke under its, or anybody's, auspices. (Forty years later a contemporary inquired if it was true that he had appeared on a platform with the tinhorn fascist Gerald L. K. Smith. He hadn't.) He not only did not become an America Firster, he made a repeated point of his not having done so: "I am not an isolationist. I have not joined the America First Committee. I should like to join a Committee for Humanity First."

Some of his close friends and colleagues were either members or advisors and consultants of America First, among them Wisconsin's liberal Senator Robert M. La Follette, Jr. (and his brother, Governor Phil La Follette), Columbia Law School Professor Philip K. Jessup, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, and Hutchins' most implacable academic enemy on his own campus, the physiologist Anton Julius Carlson. ("It was the only time in our lives that Professor Carlson and I ever agreed about anything.") Hutchins' 1932 candidate for president, Norman Thomas, though he himself headed the Socialist-pacifist-oriented Keep America Out of War Congress, spoke at America First meetings, as did President Henry Noble McCracken of Vassar. The organization boasted such mutually hostile personages as former president Herbert Hoover and United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis. And such eminently credentialed liberals as Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles A. Beard, and Stuart Chase figured prominently in the campaign against the Roosevelt approach to war, in direct or indirect association with the committee.

Hutchins was an ardent internationalist; proclaiming his affinity for an

imaginary Humanity First Committee, he said, "If the United States can serve humanity it should do so, no matter what the cost in blood and treasure." (He had long been a tireless campaigner against separatism within the university structure. "Isolation," he said in a 1936 lecture, "is bad for everybody.") Not only were he and his kind of "isolationists" anti- isolationist (in contrast with xenophobics), they were very far from being neutral. One of the earliest supporters of Bundles for Britain, Hutchins was one of the most forthright advocates of unlimited American rearmament for defense: the Wilsonianism of 1916 all over again—"He Kept Us Out of War" plus "Preparedness." Hutchins: "Will Hitler attack us? Not if we are prepared." Again and again he prefaced his assertion that he was against military intervention by saying flatly, "I am for aid to Britain."

With the Battle of Britain in the winter of 1940-41 and the indiscriminate bombing of London and other cities, men and women like Hutchins recognized that a new kind of war had come into being. With the heavy bomber come into its stupendous own, and then the long-range rocket and missile, the whole world was a battlefield, every city, town, village, factory, farm, shop, school, hospital, prison, cemetery, church, home—and every civilian, of any age or condition, a potential victim. It was not Hiroshima that brought this great new fact home—except in degree. It was London, Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden. It was the eye clinic in the open city of Marburg/Lahn, nearly all of its bandaged patients sightless, squarely hit by an aerial bomb that missed the railroad yard. A new kind of warfare, by definition consummate in the mass of pain it inflicted. And—although the airplane had invented it, and every nation would fight it from now on, its prime objective the shattering of urban industrial morale—it happened to have been launched by Adolf Hitler.

Hutchins' position, like that of the other antiwar liberals and radicals, ultimately was untenable. He wanted Nazi Germany to lose and he wanted England to win. He was for aid to Britain. How much aid? And for how long? Should a man who wanted England to win and Germany to lose and who favored aid to England draw a line at, say, arming the vessels carrying that aid, at turning over to the destined recipient destroyers to convoy that aid, at extending that aid from socks to guns and planes and, ultimately, troops? How could an advocate of aid to England say, "This far, and no further?" But Hutchins made a repeated point—without being asked—of stating that he was not a pacifist.

So the nonpacifist objector had to argue, unpersuasively—and Hutch-ins did—that America would be worse off if it went in and won than if it stayed out; that Nazi Germany, having conquered Europe, and in time (with its allies) Asia and Africa, could not successfully attack the United

States. He had to argue—and did—that the United States would lose its values, its very form of government, if it fought. ("Our form of government will not survive participation in this war and our ideals will be unrecognizable by the time we have gone through the conflict.") He had to argue—and did—that the peace that would follow our victorious war would be a bad peace. ("Our practice of life and government is not enough better to justify the hope that after we have won the war for democracy we can write a democratic peace.") He would be tempted to argue—as Hutchins was, and as Hutchins did—that this war was Armageddon and that American neutrality was what Armageddon demanded. ("If we plunge into war we shall deprive the world of its last hope. We shall rob mankind of its last chance.")

The America First Committee was predominantly conservative, with a liberal strain reflecting its origin in a group of antiwar Yale undergraduates led by R. Douglas Stuart and Kingman Brewster, Jr. (The latter would one day be president of Yale and U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.) Its chairman was a moderate conservative, Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Wood was a general—"my favorite general," Hutchins called him—but a general long since retired whose military expertise was not persuasive against that of the active military leaders supporting the president.

Though its position was supported by the great majority of the American people, America First was never able to shake the stigma attached to it by the acceptance of extreme, and even unsavory, rightists and rabble rousers. In the academic, literary, and journalistic circles of the eastern seaboard, the committee suffered a steady and steadily mounting succession of attacks as—the classic obloquy of the times—appeasers. The liberals among its leaders kept begging Hutchins to join it, with a view to his becoming its national chairman. Hutchins continued to resist, though he wrote his friend Professor Philip Jessup of Columbia, in the spring of 1941, "I now wonder if I was right in not joining America First. Although I do not like some of them, like Henry Ford, I know absolutely nothing against General Wood or Douglas Stuart, the director. On the contrary, I admire them both . .. . The reason why I am drifting toward America First is that it is the only group that is working with real effect on the problem."^[13]

It was in this same letter that he made what seems to have been the strangest judgment of his life. "I recently spent an evening with Lindbergh," he wrote Jessup. "I regard him as the most misrepresenteand maligned individual I have ever known. Perhaps I'm blind, but I can see nothing wrong with him whatever." Like all men, Lindbergh did have

something wrong with him. Several things. He was Hutchins' "uneducated specialist" par excellence, who combined ignorance, political naiveté, and a legendary reputation, to a degree that came close to saddling his idolatrous countrymen with a Man on Horseback.

Lindbergh's five national radio addresses before Pearl Harbor, and his twelve packed platform speeches, identified him as the leader of the antiwar forces. Certainly President Roosevelt was afraid of him. With a view to clipping his wings or, alternatively, grounding him altogether, the always realistic, or cynical, Roosevelt let it be known, through a third party, that there was to be a new branch of the military, a separate air force parallel with the army and the navy, with its own cabinet secretary; the post was Lindbergh's if he would go along with the president's foreign policy. Lindbergh declined the carefully concealed—but well authenticated—offer, and the president then authorized an investigation of the unbending flyer's income tax returns (a low scheme which blew up in its contriver's face when Lindbergh called a press conference and revealed that to make sure that he was making no error of calculation prejudicial to the IRS he had always added 10 percent to his tax payments).

Anne Morrow Lindbergh tried in vain to dissuade her husband from making the public statement that ended his prewar influence: "The three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration." This—and more of the same—in a speech in Des Moines on September 11, 1941. The meeting was sponsored by America First (whose officials never saw any of Lindbergh's speeches in advance), and the national reaction effectively collapsed the committee's effectiveness at a time when the national debate had reached crisis heat and the allied fortunes of war were at their nadir. "It would be difficult," says Professor Wayne S. Cole in his America First: the Battle Against Intervention, 1940-41 , "to exaggerate the magnitude of the explosion which was set off by this speech. . . . Undoubtedly much of this uproar was due to genuine disapproval of Lindbergh's key statement regarding the Jews. Many may have denounced the speech publicly to protect themselves from any possible charge of anti-Semitism. But there can be no doubt that interventionists exploited this incident."^[14] Isolationists on the whole said nothing—what could they say?—while interventionists danced in the streets. "The voice is the voice of Lindbergh," said the San Francisco Chronicle , not untypically, "but the words are the words of Hitler." Mr. Roosevelt said—and needed to say—nothing.

Hutchins had all along resisted the pleas of his friends in America First to join them. "You could almost make us respectable," Chester Bowles wrote.^[15] But Hutchins did not feel that he could avoid taking a position

on the Lindbergh imbroglio. In the Hutchins manner, he made no statement—and simply resigned (along with Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation ) publicly from the Committee against Intolerance when that organization of highly respected liberals attacked the fallen hero of the Des Moines speech as anti-Semitic. Although he greatly admired—and envied?—Lindbergh's unassailable independence and dogged disdain of censure, his extravagant esteem of the extremely limited technician remained, and remains, unsearchable. There is no record of the two or three talks the two men had in the months before Pearl Harbor, but thirty-five years after Des Moines Hutchins told a historian that the four persons he had worked with in developing his own position on the war were Benton, Bowles, Mayer—and Lindbergh. To the same careful interviewer, he said, still lamely after thirty-five years, that Lindbergh's statement "was not a timely remark."^[16]

Hutchins' attitude toward the headstrong hero had the avuncular quality of a teacher who is taken with the pigheaded persistence of a backward pupil. The two men maintained an intermittent correspondence for five or ten years after the war. Their letters were long (an unusual thing for Hutchins); and Lindbergh's, which he typed himself, were filled with positively pre-elementary questions. Hutchins patiently, painstakingly, and on the same wide-eyed level, argued with him, as often as not with tongue in cheek: "I am much encouraged by your suggestion that the important thing is the clarification of issues through discussion. I have come to this conclusion myself, even to the extent of deciding that this is the chief purpose of a university."^[17]

Hutchins, who professed disinterest in public office and quietly sought the highest one in 1940, was in all probability counted out as "unavailable" rather than politically obnoxious to the interventionist president who was choosing his running mate. For all of Ickes' and Hopkins' efforts, there is no hard evidence that Roosevelt—whose offers of high posts he had declined—gave Hutchins any consideration for the vice-presidential nomination.

The Supreme Court was, or may have been (or might have been), something else. Roosevelt filled the famous Cardozo and Brandeis vacancies with professors at Harvard and Yale, Felix Frankfurter in 1938 and William O. Douglas in 1939, both of them close friends and admirers of Hutchins.

When the conservative Justice McReynolds and the moderate Chief Justice Hughes retired in 1941, Hutchins' by then vociferous opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy precluded his appointment had it otherwise been contemplated. As the former dean of the Yale Law School, and as a

university president, he would have been acceptable "to the country." (Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, onetime dean of the Columbia Law School, was moved up into Hughes's seat.) He had supported Roosevelt's New Deal legislation and his foredoomed effort to reform, or "pack," the conservative Supreme Court. (He was a "loose" constructionist of a Constitution which was written before the modern corporate and technological world had come into being.) Five years earlier Robert Maynard Hutchins had had nowhere to go but up to the presidency or the chief justiceship; by 1941 he had nowhere to go.

There was no compelling reason why he shouldn't stay where he was. Though a probable majority of his senior faculty objected to his educational vagaries, and a faculty poll by the student newspaper in mid-1941 went two to one in favor of Roosevelt's "all aid short of war," there was no movement overt or covert to censure or get rid of Chicago's rapidly aging president on the basis of his antiwar activity. A few days before his June 1940 convocation address, "What Shall We Defend?" a campus mass meeting to arouse pro-allied sentiment presented some of his weightiest faculty members as interventionists (including Adler, who attacked the irrelevant issue of pacifism for its bad "moral thinking"); the somewhat fewer weighty colleagues who took Hutchins' position were much less loudly heard from. But Chicago was—in part because of its location—less inflammable than some of its sister institutions on the east and west coasts, and there was no personal break between Hutchins and any of his war-issue critics.

As for his trustees—Hutchins said they were "self-denying"—they were worried, as they had been ever since he'd taken office. The university's fiftieth anniversary celebration was taking place in the fall of 1941, and the celebration was the occasion (or vice versa) of the most ambitious endowment campaign in the institution's history. As Merriam and Ickes had already observed, some of the heaviest prospective donors, especially in the east, were interventionists. Middle western attitudes were divided, as Hutchins believed his board was. But isolationism was respectable in the Chicagoland of the reactionary, isolationist Tribune ; still, accustomed though they were to having to be self-denying as far as their rambunctious president was concerned, Chicago's trustees were men (always men) of caution and reserve who deplored public controversy and, indeed, any but flattering public notice. They did not know what their president's unusual activity on the national front would do to the fund-raising effort. But they knew better than to remonstrate with him, with one exception. Trustee Clarence B. Randall of the Inland Steel Corporation—it would have been worse than impolite to observe that Inland Steel was a "Jewish" concern—

was an active interventionist, and in a sharp letter to Hutchins took him to task for using the pulpit of the university chapel to deliver an antiwar lecture in the spring of 1941. "The chapel," wrote Randall, "is not a suitable forum for the discussion of controversial questions."^[18] Though Hutchins may have been on questionable ground—he had said (to a friend), "You can get away with murder under the sign of the cross"—he reminded Randall that president Angell of Yale had devoted his baccalaureate sermons to attacks on the New Deal, and added, "If a subject is important, it is likely to be controversial. I see no reason why university presidents should have to limit their chapel addresses to trivial topics."^[19]

On the whole, the self-denying board held its uneasy peace and abode uncomfortably in the hope that rich and poor donors would not be turned away by Hutchins' unfortunate conduct. They weren't. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., of the interventionist Rockefellers, was the principal speaker at the culminating banquet of the fiftieth anniversary celebration. The endowment drive went over the top, and Hutchins was able to address the gathered alumni in late September 1941 in a self-congratulatory, as well as congratulatory, frame of mind, speaking of the university in his most graceful mode—and between the lines getting a word in on salvation through war.

There are two—at least two—ways of explaining the exceptional absence of anger at Hutchins' antiwar stand on the part of faculty, trustees, donors, and alumni. It may have been that the interventionists among them were admiring of him as an educator and administrator, were congenial to his social views, taken with him personally, and could forgive him (or at least tolerate) his extracurricular crusade as an isolationist. The perhaps likelier explanation was that they sensed that when the chips were down—whatever that might mean—he would go along with them and with the country. Why otherwise would he keep saying, "I am not a pacifist?" Why otherwise would he call for military preparedness? He was known to his admirers as a safe man at bottom, a team player, for all his academic high jinks, and even to his detractors as a constitutionalist, a rules player. He had signaled his dependability in a number of ways. In 1940 a defense council was formed to provide for the impact on the university's organization and finances and to plan with the government the war tasks it could do. "As a result of this planning," the university's publicity office announced at the same time, "many scientific projects designed by the government were under way long before war was declared." In some quarters it was known officially, in others unofficially, that Chicago administrators and faculty representatives had been dispatched to Washington in 1941 to engage government officials in considering the

kinds of projects the university would be best suited to undertake; on one such mission, Vice-president Benton returned from the capital to report (more significantly than he could have known) that the government's scientific advisers were convinced that Chicago's progress in nuclear physics was uniquely advanced and its personnel in that area uniquely qualified. Ten days before Pearl Harbor, President Hutchins announced that the university's status in the natural sciences put it in a position of leadership in defense work.

More visibly significant was the Institute of Military Studies, established on the campus in October 1940 by Arthur L. H. Rubin, the all-round New Yorker of independent wealth who lived with the Mortimer Adlers and served as executive secretary of Hutchins' controversial Committee on the Liberal Arts at the university. The non-credit-course military institute was open to faculty, students, and the general (male, of course) public. Privately equipped, its students, many of them gray, many more of them portly, drilled with wooden guns and used pickup trucks as tanks. The five-dollar registration fee paid for a specially designed military cap. With volunteer civilians as instructors, the institute offered instruction in drill, manual of arms, elementary rifle marksmanship, elementary tactics and tactical exercise, mapping, bayonet and hand grenade drill, and other fundamentals. Its counterpart had appeared around the country during the preparedness campaign of 1915-16; and the professional military, now as then, had no use for it or interest in it. But before it was disbanded in 1942 it had "trained" some four thousand high-spirited, if otherwise unserviceable, enrollees. It was precisely the kind of vocationalism that Hutchins deplored as a hokey imitation of the real thing (and in this case an emotional jag). He took an especially dim view of its ecstatic leaders, Rubin (who went to the War Department after Pearl Harbor) and the economist and one-time pacifist Paul H. Douglas (who at fifty became a marine when war was declared, was wounded in the Pacific, and returned to become a Chicago alderman and ultimately an eminently liberal U.S. senator from Illinois). But the Institute for Military Studies had the formal support of the central administration of the university, and the head of the central administration was a one-man army opposing war.

This nonpacifist, propreparedness isolationist should certainly have lost friends among the extreme interventionists. But he didn't. His closest friend, over a lifetime, was Thornton Wilder. A biographer of Wilder says that the friendship really ended in 1941: "[Wilder] regarded Hitler as a virtual incarnation of the devil. . . . [He] saw Western civilization at bay, the barbarian at the gates. . . . He was terribly dismayed when on January 23, 1941, Robert Hutchins made a nationally broadcast address advocat-

ing American neutrality and warning his countryman against involvement in the European conflict. . . . Thus Wilder's adulation of Hutchins, at the end of a quarter century, fizzled out at this moment when Hutchins dug his political grave. . . . After January 1941, Wilder would speak privately about Hutchins, with a baleful shake of his head, as a man who, out of some kind of self-indulgence, had failed to fulfill his great potential."^[20]

In 1974—thirty-three years after his "adulation of Hutchins fizzled out"—I had the opportunity to speak with Wilder, whom I'd known at Chicago. He spoke "privately" with the same adulation with which he had been writing letters in the intervening years. The two men had maintained their close correspondence but hadn't seen each other in ten years or more. Wilder had really withdrawn from circulation. But now Hutchins was ill, and Wilder complained that he "couldn't get Bob to complain." I said that I hoped he would be able to get to California some time to see Bob, and Wilder said, "I don't have to look at Bob to see him. I see him all the time."

He didn't get to look at Bob again. On December 7, 1975, Thornton Wilder was dead. A year before he died, his last book appeared, Theophilus North . It was the closest Wilder would come to writing an autobiography. It was dedicated to Robert Maynard Hutchins, who spoke at his memorial service at Yale and said: "For sixty years he was my teacher. His pedagogical methods were irresistible. They were deep personal concern and laughter. When I was ill or suffering from any misfortune, the letters were faster and funnier, but the lessons were not missing. . . He was the best of teachers . . . the kindest of friends."^[21]

If Wilder was the closest friend of his youth, Laird Bell of Chicago was perhaps the closest friend of his middle life—and his lawyer, and, as chairman of the Chicago board of trustees, his boss. Bell was not only a member of the city's leading law firm, he was a formidable figure in the corporate world (for example, chairman of the board of Weyerhaeuser Lumber Company and, for example, an overseer of Harvard). He was also, in 1940 and 1941, the head of the Chicago chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies—the city's foremost interventionist, as Hutchins was its foremost noninterventionist. A decade after this confrontation Board Chairman Bell announced the anonymous endowment of the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professorship at the university; a decade later Robert Maynard Hutchins, called back to the university to preside over the dedication of the Laird Bell Quadrangle, revealed that the anonymous donor of the Hutchins professorship had been Laird Bell.

But Bell was an even-tempered man and Wilder was an affectionate man; and Harold Ickes was neither. The Old Curmudgeon was a ravening

anti-isolationist and a boiling supporter of all aid short of war. He supported Roosevelt worshipfully and, in his conversation with his friend Professor Merriam, voiced his deep disappointment in Hutchins' policy of "appeasement"; as a Chicago alumnus he had been a great admirer of Hutchins the civil libertarian and defender of academic freedom. But the last time the two men saw each other was the occasion they conspired at the Democratic convention of 1940 to advance one another's candidacy for the vice-presidential nomination. And then, on December 26, 1950, the former warmonger wrote to the former appeaser:

Dear Bob,

I have seen by the newspapers that you are about to resign from the University . . . and that you will be going to Pasadena to work for the Ford Foundation. I am glad that this important foundation is to have the benefit of your services, but I regret that Chicago will lose you. We need such leadership in this country today as you have been supplying. . . Jane and I would love it if we could see you before you move west. . . .

And the appeaser replied to the warmonger:

Dear Harold:

. . . You have always been very generous to me and this occasion is no exception. I think of you and Jane often and only wish that our paths could manage to cross once in a while. . . . Do give my love to Jane. If I come to Washington, I will not fail to see you.

What these friends, who remained friends, had in common was that they were all gentiles. It could not have been expected that the Jews in his circle—trustees and donors among them—would forgive and forget all that easily. But they did. In a few cases he and they were lost to each other for the duration, but only in a few. And even in those few cases the separation was more in sorrow than in anger. None of his Jewish friends for a moment identified Hutchins with the right-wing extremists—and outright fascists—who cluttered around the isolationist movement. Jews had always been greatly drawn to him—and he to them. (I once asked him why it was that some of his best friends were rich and influential Jews. "Because," he said, "I feel sorry for oppressed people.") His university appointments and associations were disproportionately Jewish. His intimacy with Felix Frankfurter went back to his Yale days. There was one exception—a costly one—to this continuity of Jewish friendships.

John Gunther tells the story in his biography of Albert Lasker, the multimillionaire advertising man and University of Chicago board member. "Hutchins, like Lasker, was vigorous, enlivening, and original. The two

men took to one another at once, and spent a dozen years in warm association. . . . Hutchins had the habit of getting up every morning at 5:30 A.M. , and he liked to go to bed early at night. Sleep was, however, difficult for him if Lasker was in a conversational mood, because the older man would call him at all hours of the night, posing innumerable questions and soliciting advice. . . . 'Should Edward'—Lasker's collegiate son—'have polo ponies?' Hutchins replied, 'Certainly' and rang off. . . .^[22]

"In the spring of 1942 Lasker resigned from the board of trustees of the University of Chicago. There were two reasons for this severance, which caused him much pain. First, he had turned full-wheel on international affairs [and] became . . . an ardent interventionist . . . even though this meant an irrevocable break with some of his oldest acquaintances, like Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck and Colonel McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. . . .

"All this, naturally, served to bring him into conflict with Hutchins [who] held views which Lasker, a whole-hogger if ever there was one, could not countenance, and Albert felt so deeply that Hutchins was wrong that he considered that he had no recourse but to resign his trusteeship at the University.

"However, there was a second issue. The spark which set off the explosion was something else. In March 1942, the Saturday Evening Post published an article called 'The Case Against the Jew' by Milton Mayer, a part-time employee of the University who was one of Hutchins' best friends. Mayer had done good work for the University. But his Post article (with which the University was not involved in any way) made Lasker angry, because he thought it was anti-Semitic—although Mayer was, of course, a Jew—and would give succor to anti-Semites everywhere at a time when Jews the world over were suffering the most painful, dangerous persecution in their history. Certainly Mayer's article, whatever it said, came out at a most unpropitious moment. What angered Lasker particularly was the title."^[23]

Lasker demanded that Hutchins fire Mayer. Hutchins said he didn't see how he could do that, since Mayer was a half-time employee of the university and the article had apparently been written on the other half of his time. Lasker decided to leave the board. Hutchins tried his best to make him change his mind, but Lasker refused and resigned as a trustee on June 11, 1942. In his letter of resignation, which was nine pages long, Lasker wrote: "When a trustee differs from the president of a university, the trustee should resign." "I thought the sentence would end the other way," said Hutchins afterward.

Then Lasker went after the Post . He summoned its chief executives to

New York: they came running. He threatened to withdraw all Lord and Thomas advertising from the magazine, forced it to print a retraction and an apology, and forced it to agree never to print Mayer again and to have a leading Jew write a rebuttal. (Failing to interest a leading Jew in the assignment, the Post settled for Wendell Willkie.)

Lasker was reported to be one of the ten richest men in America. He was not only exorbitantly rich, and lavish, and generous, he was exorbitantly philanthropic; he had given the University of Chicago immense amounts of money, beginning with a million dollars in 1928 for medical research; and this was even before Hutchins became president.

The financial loss to the university as a result of the break was simply incalculable. Lasker's eccentric distribution of his largesse, had Hutchins held on to him, might well have focused on the university. Hutchins neither held on to him nor did he come hurriedly—unlike the Post executives—when the outraged Croesus summoned him and ordered him to fire Mayer. Hutchins had the sole responsibility for Lasker's cutoff of the university; the author of the Post article, though he did fill-in teaching in the Hutchins-Adler Great Books courses, was covered by neither tenure nor contract; Hutchins could have fired him on the instant. He could have—but didn't. The buck stopped there. He scaped no goats, stalked no horses, hoisted no lightning rods or weather vanes. He exaggerated a little when he said (as he often did) that the life of a university president consisted entirely of shameful compromise.

Hutchins and Lasker saw each other less and less as the years went on. On one occasion, some years after the war, the two old friends found themselves seated next to one another at a dinner party. The now elderly Lasker turned to Hutchins and said, "Do you remember an article about Jews in the Saturday Evening Post during the war?" "Vaguely," said Hutchins. "You know," said Lasker, "my son-in-law gave it to me to read the other day. It wasn't a bad article. But the title was unfortunate." "Wasn't it," said Hutchins.

Lasker had been fanatical, as, in their separate fashions, had been Ickes and Wilder. It was almost impossible for Jews not to be fanatical and only a little less so for liberals and humanitarians. Fanaticism had been the order—or disorder—of the day. In the spring of 1940 Hutchins' old friend Alexander Woollcott "shook his finger in my face and said, 'The day after France falls, Hitler will be at the Panama Canal.'" Interventionism was a passionate cause, sweeping people with it in the name of humanity; anti-interventionism was essentially a bloodless affair, calling people to consider distant causes and still more distant consequences. In his running correspondence with Thornton Wilder, Hutchins wrote, after his January 23,

1941, speech, "America and the War": "I made it because I thought Mr. Roosevelt and a lot of my other friends were getting awfully light-hearted and even irresponsible about going into battle. . . . I got mad, too, about Mr. Roosevelt's message to Congress, where he appropriated all the idealism of the world for what the Chicago Tribune calls the War Party."^[24]

In mid-1941 Hutchins wrote his friend Cyrus McCormick: "If Mr. Roosevelt had never talked about the Four Freedoms, I probably should never have said anything about the war. I can understand going to war. I can understand going to war to protect yourself; I cannot understand war as a missionary enterprise, particularly when the missionary hasn't very much of a faith and isn't very sure of what he has."

The Roosevelt rhetoric simply was (as Hutchins so often said when friends suggested a phrase or an anecdote for his speeches) too rich for his blood. It wasn't reasonable. It wasn't rational. The rational animal had no choice but to reject it and attack it—rationally.

And attack it he did. Mr. Roosevelt had told the country that the war was being fought for "a world founded on freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear." America had been called upon to support the moral order and "the supremacy of human rights everywhere." Did we (Hutchins wanted to know) have freedom of speech and worship here? "We have freedom to say what everybody else is saying and freedom of worship if we do not take our religion too seriously. But teachers who do not conform to the established canons of social thought lose their jobs. People who are called 'radicals' have mysterious difficulties in renting halls. Labor organizers sometimes get beaten up and ridden out of town on a rail." What were we to say of freedom from want and freedom from fear? "Think of these things and then think of the share-croppers, the Okies, the Negroes, the slumdwellers, downtrodden and oppressed for gain. . . . They hardly know they are living in a moral order or in a democracy where justice and human rights are supreme. . . .

"As for democracy, we know that millions of men and women are disenfranchised in this country because of their race, color, or condition of economic servitude. . . . The aims of a democratic community are moral. United by devotion to law, equality, and justice, the democratic community works together for the happiness of all its citizens. I leave to you the cision whether we have yet achieved a democratic community in the United States."

The country had made "some notable advances in the long march toward justice, freedom, and democracy" and was far ahead of most of the world. "But we Americans have only the faintest glimmering of what war is like. This war, if we enter it, will make the last one look like a stroll in

the park. . . . For a generation, perhaps for a hundred years, we shall not be able to struggle back to where we were. In fact the changes that total war will bring may mean that we shall never be able to struggle back. Education will cease. Its place will be taken by vocational and military training. The effort to establish a democratic community will stop. We shall think no more of justice, the moral order, and the supremacy of human rights. We shall have hope no longer."^[25]

So the sable litany proceeded, laced freely with unanswerable facts and extravagant predictions. "If the United States is to proceed through total war to total victory over totalitarian states, it will have to become totalitarian, too." "If we enter this war, we shall lose what we have of the four freedoms."

His tactics were scary, but they weren't scare tactics. The hyperbole everywhere rose measurably after Congress on March 8, 1941, passed the crucial Lend-Lease Act, Resolution 1776 by Senate and House majorities of 60-31 and 317-71 respectively, and the country was committed to all-out aid—with no more "short of war" provisos—while the Gallup poll showed 83 percent of the American people against entering the war, a higher percentage than a year earlier. (On the other hand, a majority said they favored aiding Britain at the risk of war.)

Hutchins, too, wanted to "aid Britain, and stay out of the war" (and never did confront the implicit contradiction in those two policies). He, too, wanted the country to defend itself, to "bend every energy to the construction of an adequate navy and air force and the training of an adequate army . . . adequate for defense against any power or combination of powers"^[26] (and never did confront the implicit contradiction of that surrender to the policy of the armed-to-the-teeth garrison state and the simultaneous pursuit of the four freedoms at home to achieve "total victory over poverty, disease, ignorance, and injustice"—and at the same time "make this country a refuge for those who will not live without liberty").

This was America's destiny, to show the world "a nation which understands, values, and practices the four freedoms." This was America's destiny, to create a civilization "in which people will not suffer so much that they will trade their liberties for the pitiful security which the tyrant offers. The war to create this civilization is our war. We must take advantage of every day we have left to build a democracy which will command the faith of our people, and, which, by the light of our example, will restore the democratic faith to the people of the world. America has been called the arsenal of democracy. It has been called the larder of democracy. Let us make it the home of democracy."^[27]

He was an uncommon scold calling upon his countrymen to bend their every energy to pursue the rapidly receding objectives of the New Deal. He was pleading with them not to run away from their destiny because it was a hard one. The country had not begun to solve its problems, and he somehow seemed to suggest his hopelessness that—war or no war—it would. A strong pessimistic strain ran through his exhortatory discourse.

He had been pessimistic at Yale in 1921. He would be as much of a pessimist forty years later when as the speaker at a dinner in honor of Justice Hugo L. Black in 1961 he said, "Only if we can tear ourselves loose from our prejudices, from our ideology, from slogans, only if we can take a fresh look at the world and exercise the same kind of intelligence, character, and inventiveness that the Founding Fathers showed can we hope to revive, reconstruct, and preserve the political community."^[28]

In the decades between those two occasions he had not become any sunnier. In the decades between those two occasions he had often quoted William the Silent—or Charles the Bold, he could never remember which—as having said, "It is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere."

The emotionalism from which Hutchins recoiled was sweeping everything before it. In his post-Lend-Lease address in March—delivered as a university chapel sermon but broadcast nationwide—he used the title, "The Proposition Is Peace," borrowing the expression from Edmund Burke's address against war with the American colonies: "Judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its reason to recommend it. . . . The proposition is peace." And so Hutchins reasoned in a time of mounting frenzy, throwing himself against most of his fellow academics, his fellow humanitarians, his fellow writers and speakers. "Mr. Roosevelt tells us we are to save the 'democracies.' The democracies are, presumably, England, China, Greece, and possibly Turkey. Turkey is a dictatorship. Greece is a dictatorship. China is a dictatorship. As to England, in 1928 Mr. Anthony Eden, now Foreign Secretary, speaking in behalf of a bill extending the suffrage, felt it necessary to say to the House of Commons, 'We have not got democratic government in this country today; we never have had it and I venture to suggest to honorable Members opposite that we never shall have it.' There can be no doubt that the people of this country prefer the government of Britain to the governments of its allies or its enemies. . . . But we cannot use the word democracy to describe every country that is or may be at war with the Axis. If Russia is attacked by Germany"—as it was a few months later—"will she be welcomed into the choir of the democracies?"

The proposition had nothing but reason to recommend it, and the rational animal, addressing himself to rational animals, could not restrain his penchant for the reasoned ironic. If the British, the Chinese, and the Greeks were indeed our allies, "it is immoral for us to let them die for us while we sit safely at home. We should have been in the war from the start. We should fight now." Mr. Roosevelt had said, "We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nation-hood." Did this statement imply the restoration of prewar boundaries in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Memel, Danzig, Poland, France, China, and Rumania? Was this undertaking to be worldwide? If so, how were we to induce Russia to restore the prewar boundaries of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Poland? And what were we to do about the countries which were victims of aggression before 1939? Was everybody who stole anything before that date to keep it, and everybody who stole anything after it to give it up? What were we to do about Hong Kong, the Malay States, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China, Africa, and, above all, India? Besides his commitment to national self-determination Mr. Roosevelt had made only one statement on the course the country was to pursue after the war: "There never has been, there isn't now, and there never will be any race of people fit to serve as masters over their fellow-men." If that was so, how could a postwar America tolerate "the mastery of the whites over their yellow, brown, and black fellow-men throughout the world?" "The British propose to defeat the Axis. What they propose to do then they do not say. They have repeatedly refused to say"—this with reference to India's unabating struggle for independence. "If we go to war, what are we going to war for?"^[29]

As he had listened closely to Lindbergh and found a modicum of sense in the aviator's position—and said so—so he insisted, almost alone among the antiwar speakers, in giving his gallant due, in full measure, to the isolationist's devil: "I have supported Mr. Roosevelt since he first went to the White House. I have never questioned his integrity or his good will. But under the pressure of great responsibilities, in the heat of controversy, in the international game of bluff, the President's speeches and recommendations are committing us to obligations abroad which we cannot perform. The effort to perform them will prevent the achievement of the aims for which the President stands at home. . . . With the President's desire to see freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear flourish everywhere we must all agree. Millions of Americans have supported the President because they felt that he wanted to achieve these four freedoms for America. Others"—dealing the fat cat interventionists a rational blow—"who now long to carry these blessings to the

rest of the world, were not conspicuous on the firing line when Mr. Roosevelt called them, eight years ago, to do battle for the four freedoms at home."^[30]

Rationality demanded a fair shake for the racist Lindbergh, for the bellicose Roosevelt, and for the execrable villain of the entire piece. Knowing that no rational animal could call him an admirer of Adolf Hitler, but that many an irrationalized animal would, the frigid crusader against his own country's consuming materialism recalled that the Nazi leader had written in Mein Kampf that Greece would be remembered for its philosophy, Rome for its law, medieval Europe for its cathedrals, and the modern world for its department stores. "Hitler was right"—this in a nationwide broadcast in 1941—"in holding before the German people an ideal higher than comfort. He knew he could not give them that. He offered them instead a vision of national grandeur and 'racial' supremacy. These are false gods. Since they are false, they will fail in the end. But Hitler was half right. He was right in what he condemned, and wrong in what he offered in its place . . . a new order based on slavery and degradation."^[31]

Hitler was half right . It was the wrong time and the wrong place—America in 1941, and a broadcast of the regular Sunday morning sermon in the university chapel at that. It was the wrong time and the wrong place to say that Hitler was half right or so much as an iota right. It was the rational animal's refusal to stoop to exploitation of the hatred of the Nazi leader. But the rational animal doggedly clung to his reasoning, and, as the national frenzy mounted, Hutchins of Chicago stood ever more clearly for a less and less frequently displayed evenhandedness. At the end of November 1941, Hutchins told Mayer that he was thinking of writing an article for the conservative, antiwar Saturday Evening Post entitled, "Where Hitler Is Right."

Rationality might carry a man just that far in an irrational world—and destroy him. Millions of magazine readers might, and at that point likely would, react with extreme excitement to that kind of headline and not bother to read the article, concluding that such an article, whatever its actual import, would give aid and comfort to the forces of the enemy of mankind in America and elsewhere. "Where Hitler Is Right," indeed.

The article was never written. Pearl Harbor put an end to all that and more. It put an end to the crystal-ball expertise on all sides. Everything that had been said—in the preceding two years and almost everything had been said, one way or another—was now put to the test, including Robert Maynard Hutchins' remarkably bald predictions of the consequences of the country's going to war and winning it—"the United States will have to

become totalitarian"—"the sacrifice of millions of our youth"—"we shall have hope no longer."

On balance, his blackly pessimistic, and largely unqualified, predictions turned out to be altogether wrong or overdrawn. "Suppose that by some miracle we were to defeat the totalitarian powers without becoming one ourselves, would we be prepared, even then, to write a just and durable peace? We don't know what to do with ourselves. What shall we do with the Germans, Italians, and Japanese? What shall we do with the British and the Chinese? Are we to fight them to make them see things our way? What shall we do with Czechoslovakia, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece? Are we to restore the status quo which contributed to this war and simply hope that it will work next time? Until we know what to do with ourselves we can hardly venture to set the whole world right."

He was right—but who wasn't?—in asserting almost gleefully after the Germans turned on Russia that "alliance between Great Britain and Russia makes it clear that this is a war and not a crusade. Great Britain can not expect Russian tyranny to cooperate in the establishment of the four freedoms." But none of the most abysmal horrors he foretold was consummated with the restoration of the peace—or in the next half-century. Very far from it. True, the four freedoms could not be said to have flourished anywhere in the postwar decades (except in the one limited respect, in a few societies, of increased opportunity for minorities and women). One of President Roosevelt's asserted war aims was realized (without respect to American influence): for better or for worse, national self-determination spread through Africa and southern Asia. But freedom of speech and worship were circumscribed; want continued unabated; and fear grew pandemic as the nuclear destruction of the habitable planet loomed ever larger. Still, the antiwar campaigners of 1941 would be hard put fifty years later—though the book was not yet closed—to contend that the program of the New Deal at home was dead and buried. It fell failing after the war (just as Truman's Fair Deal and Johnson's Great Society would in large measure succumb successively to Korea and Vietnam), but the America of the 1980s was not an America that could be said to "have hope no longer."

Hutchins' extravagant polemics, wildly wide of the mark as they proved to be, were no further from the eventual reality than the ecstasies of his opponents. Neither a just nor a durable peace was written. Injustice extended its sway through eastern Europe and simply changed hands in

Africa and southeast Asia as the victorious and defeated powers alike lost their empires; and five years after Mr. Truman proclaimed, in the wake of Hiroshima, that "there must never be another war," the United States was at war in Korea. Neither the isolationists nor the interventionists proved to have a monopoly on being dead wrong within a decade of their prognostications.

How could the rational animal have gone so far out on a limb? How could he have let himself descend to so irrational a level? In one sense it was characteristic of him to speak with overweening certitude. He had been doing it most of his life. But most of his life he had known what he was talking about, and a great deal more than most of his opponents, on the subject to which he addressed himself, namely, education.

But in 1941 he was making cathedratic pronouncements on the life-and-death issue of world war in which his competence was derived from his genius for quick apprehension of the unfamiliar. His public activity during those months—no other college or university president appeared anywhere nearly as prominently in the great debate—was decidedly uncharacteristic of the man who had been the most conscientious and self-confined of educational administrators and had, what was more, achieved a considerable national reputation as a pleader for the evenhanded dialogue of inquiring minds.

There may have been two good explanations, if not justifications, for his having gone to such rhetorical extremes on the war issue. First, he had taken a lonely position. Hutchins had distanced himself completely from organized support. Not only did he dissociate himself, as he said in an early address, from "all Nazis, Fascists, Communists, and appeasers"; he dissociated himself from the true-blue isolationists, "from those who want us to stay out of war to save our own skins and our own property." He was, on the contrary, a true-blue interventionist opposing war: "National selfishness should not determine national policy." He stood alone, in the antiwar position least likely to draw or hold the interest of a substantial following. It was a position that might well push a man to overstatement.

But there was, perhaps, a better explanation than that for the recklessness that so clearly contradicted the close reasoning with which he habitually confronted his opponents in academic controversy. Beneath the frigid isolationist was the passionate moralist. Behind the thinking man's facade was the true believer not in rightness but in righteousness, who saw himself fighting the eternal rearguard action against the forces of evil and the false prophets of sweet deceits like the four freedoms. The glories of war—and of the peace that would follow it—were simply too rich for his blood. He had been brought up, he once said, on the Old Testament

prophets. His favorite castigation was Jeremiah's, who said that his people were "wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge."

Neither did the eminent intellectual call his countrymen to an intellectual revolution but rather, again and again, in season and out, to a "moral, intellectual, and spiritual revolution." He took occasion more than once in the great debate to crib Jacques Maritain's solemn maxim, "If we would change the face of the earth, we must first change our own hearts." Robert Maynard Hutchins called his countrymen to "build a new moral order for America . . . a new conception of security . . . a new conception of sacrifice."

It would pass, as peace would pass and war would overcome; he would be a university president again, doing what a university president does. But for a few months of his life he was a missionary, the whole world his mission.

21
A War Plant

A month after Pearl Harbor, Hutchins addressed his faculty and board: "When war has been declared," he said, "long-run activities must be sacrificed to the short-run activity of winning the war. Education and research, as we have understood them at the University of Chicago, are long-run activities. We have stood for liberal education and pure research. What the country must have now is vocational training and applied research. What the country must have we must try to supply."^[1]

But what the country "must have" was precisely what the prewar Hutchins didn't want to supply. For ten years he had been saying that education was the utilization of the liberal arts to inculcate independent thinking. Now he said, straight-faced, "Since we know what teaching is and how to teach what to whom, we can exercise our ingenuity in planning training courses which might not occur to persons less sophisticated than ourselves. Our special knowledge makes us directly useful in the effort to win the war."^[2]

Thirty days after the country went to war—or, rather, war went to the country—he was able to report that there were sixteen military training programs of various kinds on the campus. A month later his office proudly announced that "all indications are that the University's service in this war will be even more striking than the notable part it played in World War I." Government contracts had already been signed for a million dollars' worth of research projects ("highly confidential") involving more than two hundred investigators, and still others had been launched by the university itself. Almost 3,500 persons, most of them special students, were enrolled in military courses in such subjects as meteorology, map reading, military medical hygiene, military optics, elementary gliding, mechanics, electron-

ics, production supervision, nursing supervision, and German. Vacation and holidays had been shortened; instruction was increased to fifty-nine hours a week and from forty-four to forty-eight weeks a year; and a split-week course schedule had been arranged, enabling students to take on jobs three or four days out of seven.

And one of Hutchins' most long-stymied reforms was at last adopted. The BA degree—to be dubbed Bastard of Arts by its detractors—would now be awarded after two years of college to represent the completion of general education assumed to have been begun after the sophomore year of high school, either in the four-year "Hutchins" College of the university or, in the case of a student who completed two years of the standard high school, in the last two years of the university's traditional college program (which was maintained vestigially, amid some confusion, alongside the "Hutchins" College with a capital C).

What he dreamed of, and would never see, was a six-four-four plan of general education the country over. He had been calling for it since 1931 (and in 1938 the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association had endorsed it). The subsequent proliferation of two-year junior colleges produced the commonly adopted six-three-three-two system by splitting the high school into two three-year units of junior and senior high; but the final two-year unit floated in midair, essentially two more years of high school or a weak imitation of the first two years of the state university. (At the University of California in Berkeley 60 percent of the undergraduate enrollees entered in the third year from junior colleges.) Failing a rationalization on the system all the way down the line, Hutchins was now asking his faculty for the equivalent of an eight-two-four plan (with the last two elementary grades knocked off for pupils of the University of Chicago Laboratory School). With the country at war, he was suddenly persuasive: "We have waste because of the 8-4-4 plan of elementary, secondary, and collegiate education. We have waste because students without qualifications for independent intellectual work are allowed to continue beyond the end of the sophomore year. We have waste because the program of graduate instruction does not take into account a fact patent on the surface of our professional life: a course of study which aims to produce both good scholars and good college teachers ends by producing neither. This is an educational system which the country can no longer afford"^[3] —a system which he had been saying for years that the country could not afford. But now there was a war on—there had been for thirty days, when he addressed the faculty—and the reformer was fighting for one more reform under the guise of wartime necessity and wartime

economy. What assured its approval was the fact that it would enable the student to get his degree before he was called up for military service at twenty.

The new degree, Hutchins said, would have meaning. It would mean a general education. It would "assist out of the educational system at the end of the sophomore year students who have no business to go on. It would make it possible for the Divisions to organize intelligible courses of study covering years and leading to the master's degree. It would enable the professional schools to begin their work with the beginning of the junior year. It would put a quietus on the ambitions of the junior colleges of the country, all of which are now anxious to achieve a mistaken notion of respectability by becoming four-year colleges of liberal arts."^[4] He pointed out that it was a system that could be installed at Chicago at once, because the college already admitted high school juniors.

While he was at it—calling for a program that, wartime or peacetime, was close to impossible for any intelligent educator to oppose—he tossed a much tougher proposal, peacetime or wartime, into the faculty hopper. He told his audience that two PhD degrees were wanted—one to signify preparation for research and the other to signify preparation for college teaching. But this would, he was afraid, require "a change of heart before attempting the mechanical change" that he had urged from time to time in the past. Without the change of heart the two PhD degrees "might simply give us two bad courses of study instead of one." He would not get the change of heart he called for. His proposal to touch the hallowed doctorate would be lost—as he doubtless supposed it would be—in the hurried hurrah with which the Bastard of Arts was approved by the senate.

The relocation of the BA was a major triumph for Hutchins, reminiscent of the honeymoon days of the early 1930s. (It was an illusory triumph in the long run; the faculty revoked it in 1954, after he had resigned.) In the thirties he had got what he wanted because of the Depression emergency. Now he got what he wanted because of the war emergency. The measure was presented to the Senate Committee on University Policy at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon; by 5:30 it (and three other measures) had been voted on favorably and transmitted to the full senate, where it was adopted on a sixty-three to forty-three vote.

Less than three months later, on April 9, 1942, a motion to rescind the action was introduced on the senate floor. The meeting was one of the most heavily attended in the body's history; and Hutchins, presiding, was aware, as the discussion proceeded, that the new "two-year degree" was in danger. He appeared to be detached, the very model of a nonpartisan presiding officer, and at no point allowed himself to be drawn into the discus-

sion. And then one of his enemies, Professor George K. K. Link, in botany, made the mistake of asking that the vote on the issue be by ballot instead of by voice—obviously implying that there were senators who did not want to defy the president openly. Link's proposal was accepted, and the vote was fifty-eight to rescind the action and fifty-seven to sustain it.

This was, in effect, a vote of no confidence. The two-year college had the support of the leading members of the Department of Education and other social scientists, including the heavyweight professors William E. Dodd in history and Charles E. Merriam in political science, much of the humanities division, and representatives of the professional schools; but the hard core of the natural sciences opposed it. What saved it, that crucial day in April, was a shabby trick played by Robert M. Hutchins, who knew (as he knew so many odd things) his Robert's Rules of Order. The presiding officer had no voice ordinarily—that is, in a viva voce decision—but when a measure was balloted he had a vote. With the tally of fifty-eight to fifty-seven in favor of rescinding, Hutchins cast his vote to sustain, and on the resulting tie the motion was lost.

The trick was not only shabby; it was, in the short, no less than the long, term ineffectual. It simply hardened the opposition to him and worried his friends in the faculty and on the board. It would have been better, he said afterward, had he accepted the immediate defeat and lobbied patiently to have it reversed later on.^[5] But he had run out of patience. The debonair presiding officer was, when he coolly cast the deciding vote to retain the new degree, an outraged partisan who saw his fifteen years' labor coming undone.

The adoption of the two-year degree three months earlier had evoked only casual notice, and general approval, outside the educational establishment as a sensible step in connection with conscription. Inside the establishment the "cut-rate degree" was massively deplored. It was deplored by, inter alia, the Association of American Colleges, the National Association of State Universities, and the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. The NCA supposedly held the power of academic life and death in the central states through its system of accreditation of institutions. It first threatened to disaccredit the University of Chicago, but softened its attitude (after the university ignored the threat) to approval of the arrangement as a five-year "experimental" program. (It never again mentioned the matter.)

"This," said Hutchins, "is the first time that the full-dress assemblages of principalities and powers have publicly, officially, and formally deplored the University's conduct. It marks an all-time high in educational deploring. The University must have done something very bad indeed.

"What the University has done is to announce that it will make it possible for students to get a liberal education by the end of the sophomore year and that it will award at that point, in recognition of their efforts, the degree traditionally associated with liberal education, namely, the Bachelor of Arts.

"Why is this bad? Offhand, it would appear highly desirable. Nobody has ever complained that college students work too hard. On the contrary. . . . It has often been asserted on very high authority that the American educational system prolongs adolescence far beyond the point at which young people in other countries are turned out of education to assume adult responsibilities. In other countries this age is eighteen or nineteen; here the first honorable stopping-place is at twenty-two. . . . Apparently the time is available in the educational system to complete liberal education at the age of twenty; and, if it can be done, there seem to be great advantages in doing it.

"The war emphasizes these advantages. The conscription age is twenty. If the members of the American community are to get a liberal education, which is the education every free citizen of a free community ought to have, they must get it by the time they are twenty years old. . . .

"[The BA] is the recognition accorded a person who has passed through an eight-year elementary school, a four-year high school, and a four-year college. These institutions are regarded as fixed and immutable, to be eternally crowned by the bachelor's degree. What goes on in them is not important. The degree does not stand for education; it stands for a certain number of years in an educational institution, and this is not the same thing. . . .

"If, then, the bachelor's degree has no meaning, why is the action of the University of Chicago, which is an attempt to give it meaning, so bad? The answer is that the degree is the symbol of the status quo. It is the symbol of the eight-year elementary school, the four-year high school, and the four-year college. It is the only thing that holds this system together. If you take away the degree, this system must fall apart—or reorganize. The degree has operated like a protective tariff in favor of this system. If it can be awarded at the end of the sophomore year, then those committed to this system must face the educational problems they have been able to dodge. They must figure out what they are doing at each level and why. They must change the habits of their lives. Such suggestions are disconcerting. . . . What the academic potentates want to do is to keep things as they are. . . . With the world in dissolution the status quo can not be maintained. But even if it could be, we should not attempt it. We should welcome the

opportunity which the war has given us to rectify the American educational system."^[6]

"I shall be glad," Hutchins wrote the president of one of the deploring organizations, "to have graduating seniors in the institutions of the Southern Association [of Colleges and Secondary Schools] try the examinations that will be given for the bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago."^[7] During the new BA's first few years in effect, undergraduate enrollment dropped; many graduate schools (and Chicago's own natural sciences division) refused to recognize the "two-year degree." The deploring and the boycott both subsided, in time, and three years after the adoption of the new degree Hutchins informed the British Association of University Professors that studies by the Chicago Board of Examinations "have demonstrated that students completing the College do as good or better work than graduates of any program of undergraduate study in the country."

"We are signing more government contracts every day," he wrote his friend Professor Malcolm Sharp of the law school.^[8] "You wouldn't," he wrote the retired Egyptologist Charles Breasted, "know the old place. We are simply running a big war industry here."^[9] He appeared before the neighborhood draft board on behalf of junior administrative officers to ask that they be placed in category 2-A, "indispensable war workers." Program piled on program, in spectroscopy, high-frequency radio, signaling, surveying, and, of course, physics and chemistry. More and more of the campus was commandeered as civilian enrollment of men fell steadily. In August of 1942 the university announced that its facilities were largely being employed for direct war purposes; the navy was using part or all of twelve buildings on the campus, including the men's and women's gymnasiums and the men's dormitories. The air force was training cadets in the field house and glider pilots in the stadium. And—mirabile dictu —the university's Charles R. Walgreen Foundation for the Study of American Institutions was giving a series of pep-rally public lectures on democracy and the democratic system.

President Conant of Harvard, a pre-Pearl-Harbor interventionist, said that it was the responsibility of the universities in wartime to guard carefully "the eternal verities." Never again—he was referring to the First World War—would Harvard be allowed to become merely an armed camp because of global conditions. But an armed camp was what Harvard and every other university became in a marvelous hurry. Tuition income everywhere (as much as 80 percent of the revenue of state universities) plummeted with enrollment; in January 1943, Hutchins wrote that he expected no students at Chicago after July except those sent by the govern-

ment, and in the fall of that year the entire Harvard Graduate School was down to two hundred students. The story was the same across the country.

In 1941 the U.S. Army was staging maneuvers with wooden guns; in 1942 the United States, including Harvard, including Chicago, was the armed camp Conant hoped it wouldn't be, fueling the fires of war all over the earth; exactly six months after the "destruction" of their Pacific Fleet the Americans turned the course of the war in the Battle of Midway. At the beginning of 1944 Hutchins informed the faculty that that year "the income and expenditures of the University of Chicago will be the largest of any university in the world."^[10]

At the outset of the conversation the ex-isolationist told the faculty, "We are now engaged in total war. Total war may mean the total extinction, for the time being, at least, of the characteristic functions of the University. I say this as flatly and crudely as I can, not because I expect it to happen but because it seems to me essential that we understand that the setting of our work has completely changed. We are now an instrumentality of total war."^[11] Like Lucky Strike green, Chicago maroon had gone to the front.

In telling Malcolm Sharp that he expected only government students to be entering the university in July of 1943, Hutchins said: "The Army program for the eighteen-nineteen-year-olds looks worse and worse. But we have no right to expect that the Army would be interested in education."^[12] What then of his fine talk of the university's knowing "what teaching is and how to teach what to whom"? Had he really supposed that the university's knowledge of the liberal arts and the Socratic seminar was what would be wanted? He had been a soldier and had read Faust in a pup tent on the Italian front; but it wasn't reading Faust in a pup tent on the Italian front that had won that war or any other.

The University's million-dollar-a-year deficits—in a budget of ten million or so—had been ascribable entirely to pure research, the chief glory of a great institution of higher learning. The financial outlook, before Pearl Harbor, had not been rosy; year after year gifts to income, instead of to endowment, had kept the Gothic doors open. Every great university, even the oldest and most heavily endowed, was always in the same case: where was the money to come from to finance the kinds of investigation that only a university would undertake, investigation that might or might not yield results, or yield them in one year or a hundred, or yield them in such form as to have consequences adaptable to the concrete problems of life and society? "If it had not been for the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harkness fortunes," said Hutchins retrospectively, "there would have been no such

thing as research in American universities [prior to 1939]. A. P. Sloan, chairman of General Motors, told me that all useful inventions came out of the shop: there was no point in supporting basic research. What was true of industry was even truer of government. Government saw no point in research; and the universities never thought of asking its support. If a president or professor had thought of doing so, he would have been restrained by the trustees or regents, who would have been horrified by such a socialistic idea. This war will be won in the laboratories."^[13] It would be won in the laboratories, all right; specifically in the laboratories of the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942—though the manner of its winning would not be made known to the world until August 6, 1945, at Hiroshima.

That historic research that culminated in the University of Chicago laboratories was certainly pure research. But it would never have been subsidized by the government had it not promised earth-shaking consequences of a practical order. What ordinarily distinguished the work of the university scientist was its divorce—irresponsibly?—from the end purpose to which it might ultimately be put by others. Hutchins, and he alone, could follow the gleam wherever it might lead, with the "value-free" detachment that the philosopher deplored—the philosopher preoccupied with the ends and the means appropriate to the ends. The commercial or governmental scientist's research was, in itself, just as pure; it might be a dozen, or a hundred, steps removed from application; the researcher might not even know what the application was intended to be; but he knew that he would not be maintained if there were no purpose beyond his own. The purpose he served was somebody else's; the purpose of the university scientist was his own: knowledge for the sake of knowing. There was no such thing in his lexicon as failure—there were discarded hypotheses, tried and found wanting, on the road to knowledge. He was not trying to produce something. The institution which employed him was not trying to produce something. In this sense most of the work being done in the university laboratories after Pearl Harbor was not, strictly, university work.

Thirty days after Pearl Harbor, 50 percent of all the research going forward in the natural sciences at Chicago—up to 80 percent in some departments—was war research specifically designed and supported as such by the federal government. A year later that percentage "in some departments" (physics, certainly) was put at 90 percent. Even as he committed the institution to the whole hog war effort, the educational rolutionary who had done his best to keep his country out of war concluded his January 1942 address to the faculty on a cautionary note that recalled

what now seemed to be a bygone Hutchins, or at least a shelved one, to an audience that had never before heard him (and would never again hear him) throw himself and his university into the service of total war:

"Our basic function, intellectual leadership, remains the same. Another has been superimposed upon it which will make it hard, perhaps impossible, to carry on our basic function. . . . Victory can not save civilization. It can merely prevent its destruction by one spectacular method. To formulate, to clarify, to vitalize the ideals which should animate mankind, this task . . . is the incredibly heavy burden which rests, even in total war, upon the universities. If they can not carry it, nobody else will; for nobody else can. If it can not be carried, civilization can not be saved."^[14]

Lots the country cared, in 1942, about the incredibly heavy burden to formulate, to clarify, to vitalize the ideals which should animate mankind. It was no time for bemoaning the condition of civilization, at least not of American civilization. There was a war on.

In 1942, five thousand soldiers and sailors, in civilian clothes, took the place of the nine hundred male students who had already left, and more than 60 percent of all the Spring graduates went one way or another to war. Now there was no extracurricular activity to be seen. "The war program," a memo to the alumni said, "demonstrates the University's capacity to serve the nation in a new way."

But President Hutchins, commander in chief of the university's new way of serving, was dissatisfied with the way it was going. "My objection to what the Army is doing," he wrote a friend, "is that it does not seem to me to be good military training." He took to the pages of the Saturday Evening Post , under the title, "Blueprint for Wartime Education," to attack what he called the chaos and to suggest the Hutchins Plan, as the Post called it, for bringing order out of it. The Hutchins Plan had six major proposals, none of them thereafter adopted in full. ("The war," he said afterward, "lasted only three years longer. That was not time enough for the Army to get moving.") "If," he wrote, summarizing his proposals, "we have a comprehensive plan under the War Manpower Commission, if we prohibit volunteering and competitive recruitment and lower the conscription age to 18, if we select the young people to be educated in terms of the contribution they can make to victory, with a two-year liberal arts course before determining aptitudes for special training, if we pay them, so we can be sure that intelligence and not money gets them into college, then we can supply the leaders we need. . . . I am proposing that the higher learning should be reformed"—getting a lick in as the bombs burst in the air—"to do what we have always said it did—train the minds of the leaders of our country."^[15]

The overnight transformation of the university involved the transformation of its faculty. The new men and women—nearly all men—on the campus were almost all of them unidentifiable, and nobody bothered to think of them in terms of academic rank; they were all but nameless government types sent to Chicago to run training programs. But there was one area in which that was not the case at all, and that was physics (and to some extent chemistry).

The new men in physics had been coming in since 1939, indeed since Hitlerism drove some of them out of Germany as refugees. They were famous, a fistful of Nobel Prize winners among them. Some of them were at the university regularly now, some from time to time. They had names like Urey, Franck, Teller, Oppenheimer, Wigner, Rabi, Bethe, Lawrence, Seaborg. Nobel Prize winner Arthur H. Compton, the head of the physics department, was reported to be in charge of the super-hush-hush "Metal-lurgical Project." Hearing of the Compton project, Mortimer Adler, whose forte was metaphysics, not physics, and who didn't know an atom from an atomizer, said to a friend, "Do you suppose he's split the atom?" (The splitting of the atom nucleus, atomic fission, had been achieved in 1934 by Fermi in Italy and by the Joliot-Curies in France.) The general nature of Compton's recent work was known; around the peacetime faculty-club luncheon tables he had airily predicted that the day would come when a transatlantic liner would cross the ocean for a dime.

The great men of physics and chemistry were not seen much, on or off the campus; they seemed to be much busier than even conscientious research men usually were; and they seemed to be traveling a great deal (no one knew where). They joined in luncheon small talk at the club—very small talk.

They were, on the whole, amiable but uncommunicative, even regarding trivial matters, as if they were afraid that they might say something that might lead to an embarrassing question from someone at the table, a commonplace question like, "Did you ever meet Professor So-and-So in Denmark?" During all of the war years I frequently sat with one or more of them at one of the large round tables at the club—they did not ordinarily segregate themselves at lunch—and I did not ever hear any of them say anything that might lead to a discussion of anything more sensitive than the weather. (I never heard the expression "atomic bomb.")

There was one exception to the reserved (not grim, simply reserved) presence of these giants; a short, rotund Hungarian of whom nothing at all seemed to be known outside the closed world of physics. As I was living at the club at the time and so was he, we often talked at breakfast or in the club residence corridors. I was properly circumspect, to avoid prying; but

he displayed an interest in me and my work (as he did in everyone's) that flowered after the war in a personal friendship and an exchange of manuscripts. (One of the hundred-and-one things he did well was writing pixieish short stories. Another was making imperishable observations à la hongroise . At the time of the Berlin air lift after the war he said, "We should notify the Russians that if they take one more aggressive step we'll blow ourselves up.") Unlike most, if not all, of his colleagues in and out of science, he dressed very expensively and fastidiously and still managed to look like a bag of laundry. He abhorred manual labor; and long before it was generally known, I was (so to say) privy to the fact that he refused to flush the toilet in his room.

Day after day I had breakfast with the father of the atomic age—not of this or that device that shook the world, but of the discovery that turned it upside down. This little hanka-stanka of a man was Leo Szilard, known very fondly to Hutchins as Leo the Lizard. He and Hutchins enjoyed an immense degree of mutual confidence both during and after the war, and he, along with Enrico Fermi, played a central role in the postwar establishment of the three nuclear institutes on the campus.

On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Roosevelt that began, "Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. . . . It may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium. . . . This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed." The letter had been drafted by Szilard after the material for it had been presented to Einstein (who had no expertise in nuclear physics) by Szilard and Edward Teller, the subsequent "father of the H-bomb." It was in response to the Einstein letter that the "Manhattan Engineering District" and the "Metallurgical Laboratory"—code names for the atomic bomb project—were established a few months later.

Szilard was a mystery man among the mystery men when he came to Chicago with Fermi from Columbia at the outset of the Metallurgical Project. He was a bachelor of obviously independent means who accepted important research appointments in Europe and America without salary. At St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London he had discovered what is known as the Szilard-Chalmers effect, the basis of so-called "hot-atom" chemistry, and with Einstein he had developed a liquid-metal pumping

system. All his scientific patents he turned over to the British and U.S. governments.

The total scientific cosmopolitan, he was all over the world lot in nuclear studies. Well before the war his knowledge that the production of a nuclear explosive would require great quantities of uranium combined with his knowledge of Einstein's friendship with the Belgian royal family to produce a letter to the Belgian Queen Elizabeth, which effectively urged that government to keep the Belgian Congo's uranium out of German hands. At the very outset of the Metallurgical Project Szilard crusaded for absolute secrecy, long before anyone in the American government understood what the odds were. That secrecy was recognized after the war as a major factor in preventing the German scientists from constructing an atomic pile. An exotic genius, Szilard, as the French critic Jacques Monod said, "knew that meaningful ideas are more important than any ego." It was Szilard, said Teller long afterward, "who prodded us into working on atomic energy." The paternity of the nuclear age was, of course, multiple; the godfathers were the two theorists of modern science, Einstein with his general theory of relativity and Max Planck with his quantum mechanics. The fathers were a dozen men and women in Europe and America who had one man as a referent in common: Leo Szilard.

22
Unhappy Warrior

This was the company into which Hutchins was thrown (or had thrown himself) for the duration—the "generals" of Washington (many of them civilians but all of them happy warriors) and the sententious scientists. The business that brought them together was the kind of investigation in which Hutchins had no interest or competence. Apart from the people in the laboratories, he alone had been told what the project really was and what progress was being made on it; and what even he knew, he knew on a strictly need-to-know basis. He had gone to his deans with the government's proposal that Chicago take it on, and then to his trustees, and he had had to ask both groups to take him, and the proposal, almost entirely on faith.

He was permitted to tell them only that the project had to do with the possible discovery of the technique for manufacturing a new kind of weapon which, if it could be built, might alone win the war; that there was no limit to the demands which might be made upon the university by the government (and the army) in connection with the investigation; that it was an unbelievably expensive kind of investigation that had to be conducted on a half-dozen different fronts all at once because of the war urgency; and that the urgency was critical because it was possible that the Germans were trying to produce the same weapon. He was not allowed to mention uranium, from which it was supposed that the explosive material would have to be extracted by an ;is yet unknown process; he knew (because Szilard knew) that one of the first things the Germans had done when they took over Czechoslovakia in 1938 was stop the export of uranium from one of the world's few major deposits there.

He was asked (by one of his trustees) if there was the possibility of physical danger to the university "or the city." He said he would have to

find out about that, and several weeks later reported that he had been told that such danger appeared to be unlikely but could not be excluded. One of his deans—McKeon, of humanities—recalled many years later that Hutchins' reply to the question whether any other institution had been approached by the government was that Harvard had turned it down for fear it might fail and that Columbia had rejected it for other reasons. (The implication in the case of Columbia was either that it might be physically dangerous or that the great scientific strength on Morningside Heights lay in other areas than that of the project). No source other than McKeon is to be found for the Harvard/Columbia story in any of the literature of the project or of the institutions involved or their heads. Hutchins was free to say that one of the reasons Chicago was asked to undertake the project was its location in the country's interior.

Informed only in bare outline, prohibited from sharing even that degree of information, and precluded from asking questions of the scientists, he occupied a peculiarly lonely position—all the lonelier for a so recently vehement opponent of war and a long-time critic of what he called scien-tism, the Deweyite faith that man's problems were soluble in the laboratory. It was a lonely post and an unentertaining one, running a vast congeries of barracks, drill grounds, job programs, and secret laboratories. He was the maintenance man, or custodian, of a half-billion-dollar multipurpose housing project with which he had no integral connection. The man who a few months earlier addressed the country so eloquently on the proposition, "The Proposition Is Peace," was now administering an establishment dedicated to the proposition that the proposition was war.

He saw less and less of his friends, more and more of people he had nothing in common with except the endless making of endless administrative arrangements. The Office of the President was now the Central Administration, falling all over itself with vice-presidents who were capable of doing all the donkey work and passing it on to him in the final, contractual stages. He was able to depend on them, but they were not his friends, and one or two of them were less friendly than that. The notable exception was W.C. Munnecke, Wilbur, Will, or Willie, a friend and neighbor of the Mortimer Adlers and a singularly gifted and literate businessman. Hutch-ins had kidnapped him from the vice-presidency of Marshall Field and Company, and he served as liaison between the administration and the echelons of the Metallurgical Project, including the "generals" (some in Washington, some on the campus) and the scientists. Munnecke knew the names of all the people involved, visited the various sites and laboratories at Argonne and Oak Ridge—and remembered having to convince the General Accounting Office that a bill for one ton of heavy water at

$250,000 was OK to pass for payment ("That's what the Canadians were charging for the stuff"). He was over his ears in procurement and budgeting, and, along with Szilard, he was the one person directly connected with the secret project whose company Hutchins enjoyed.^[1]

Dutifully and despondently Hutchins went about the business that so radically distinguished the culture of the mechanic, including the mechanical wizard, from the culture of the philosopher. One of the traditional taunts of his academic enemies had been, "The philosopher has no laboratory." The philosopher had laboratories enough now, but they were not conducting philosophical research. Even the despondent, dutiful philosopher could not sustain himself on that sort of diet. He was bound to break loose, one way or another; many ways, likely.

Many ways. One Sunday in April of 1942 he preached in the university chapel (still filled, that first spring of the war, with the kind of student, the Chicago student, who would soon vanish for the duration). His sermon was a kind of cry—and not a war cry: "I am not so naive as to assume that the American people can become good overnight, or that if they try and fail they will lose the war and lose the peace. The question is rather what are the ideals that we set before us and how sincere and serious is the effort we make to achieve them.

". . . [The American people] do not need to be told that war calls for equality of sacrifice and that neither capital nor labor can be allowed to extract profit from a process which is sending thousands of men to their deaths. They do not need to be told that racial and religious discrimination in the Army, Navy, and war industries is undemocratic. They do not need to be told that rural slums and urban slums are undemocratic or that the condition of those on public relief is as undemocratic as it was before the war. They do need to be told that it is undemocratic to arrange the distribution of educational opportunity so that the child in the poor State gets little compared with the child in the rich State, the child of a poor family gets little compared with the child of a rich family, and the negro child gets little compared with the white. . . .

"We can try to establish the good society here and now." Here and now , with a world war on. "The effort is not expensive." As if any effort that wasn't the war effort would be seen to be inexpensive. "It will not divert the country from its military endeavors." As if anything that wasn't military wouldn't divert the country from its military endeavors. "Unless we make it, our military endeavors will fail." In the event, the effort wasn't made, and the military endeavors succeeded. "We are accustomed to the doctrine that mere defensive military operations can not win a war. It is just as true that mere defensive social, economic, and political operations,

mere defense of the status quo, will lose a war." But the war would be won for the status quo. "It will also lose the peace. And international organization, without a change of heart, would be the greatest prize of greed and ambition, and hence the most alarming portent of universal destruction, that the world has ever seen." This was three years before anyone thought of the United Nations. "We need a new order for America. If we do not provide it, Hitler will." We didn't provide it, and neither did Hitler. Men who do not want to live like beasts must make up their minds to live like men." But there was a war on.

He spoke, that Sunday, to a sympathetic audience of his own students, Chicago students, Hutchins students. But the audience outside had disappeared. His sermon was neither broadcast nor printed.^[2]

That summer, the first summer of the war, was the liveliest in the history of the Chicago campus. Chicago's quarter system had always included an abbreviated session in the midwestern heat under loungelike conditions with classes under the trees and something like an idyllic tempo. Most faculty and most students were traditionally away; most administrators, too, including, invariably, the chief administrator. Hutchins did not know what it was to have a holiday. He had no hobbies and no interests unrelated to his work. But he could get work done out of the office that he couldn't in it. And he was pretty forcibly urged by his wife to get away for the two summer months or so with her, their small girls relegated to the care of a none too satisfactory nanny. The two of them worked—Maude Hutchins was writing novels—and took long walks with Mrs. Hutchins' very expensive Great Dane. Ordinarily they went east, taking a seashore house in his ancestral Connecticut. There they lived in isolation.

There, in Connecticut, in spite of the fact that the summer quarter of 1942 was the university's busiest since its establishment, he made the most of his isolation by working on a project every day and into the night. But it was not a war project. It was an elaborate exercise in orthodox scholarship, such as he had not done since Yale and would never take time to do again—a two-part treatise on the political philosophy of Edmund Burke, complete with a hundred or so footnotes citing both eighteenth-century and modern sources and commentaries in English, French, and American letters. The two parts were published as "The Theory of Oligarchy," in the Maritain celebratory volume of The Thomist in January 1943, and "The Theory of the State," in The Review of Politics for April of 1943). They traced Burke's flamboyant inconsistencies and self-contradictions, from his egalitarian support of natural rights as anterior to the state, in the case of the American colonies, to the blackest sort of reac-

tionary defense of the prerevolutionary monarchy of absolutist France. The two essays together constituted a serious and substantial contribution to American revolutionary theory and its derivation from Locke.

Here, then, was the chief executive officer of a $150,000,000 war plant (with a sudden annual budget twice that) turning out assembly-line glider pilots, meteorologists, atomic bombs—running the operation by remote control, telephone, telegraph, scribbled notes, through a network of hastily installed vice-presidents, and devoting himself to a close analysis of an eighteenth-century Englishman. What emerges from this historical juxtaposition is the recognition that the chief executive was so little enamored of the assembly line he operated that he would do anything else at all, preferably something that was two centuries and an ocean distant, to get away from it for a bit.

It was a solid job, the unmistakably substantial work of a constitutional lawyer catapulted, at a most paradoxical season, into constitutional history and constitutional philosophy. But if it hadn't been Burke it would have been—and soon it was—something else.

The Burke project was his own idea—unlike most of the things he turned up doing. He sounded as if he was pulling the Bad Man trick when he observed (as he often did) that the enterprises he directed were all thrust on him by his friends. His modesty exaggerated the fact, but not entirely. Anybody who wanted to get anything done that needed forthright leadership in the cultural arena came to Hutchins with it; he was known as a fearless (even a reckless) innovator.

It was not only the cranks with a dozen bad ideas who forced themselves on him; his associates with a good idea found him a pushover for it. It was Bill Benton who broached the university's acceptance of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and put up the necessary $100,000 to transfer the ownership of the ancient and honorable enterprise from Sears Roebuck. The deal was consummated the day after pearl Harbor at a luncheon Benton arranged with the Sears board chairman, Robert E. Wood; and it was Benton who reorganized the business and ran it—with Hutchins in and out as chairman of its editorial board. It was Benton who conceived the fifty-four-volume Britannica set of the Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer Adler who conceived the best-selling Syntopicon as a two-volume topical index to the set—with Hutchins in and out as editor-in-chief. It was the philosophical economist John U. Nef who concocted the Committee on Social Thought as an independent graduate body within the university; Bruno Bettelheim, whom Hutchins brought from Germany, who directed the university's Orthogenic School; Antonio Borgese, the great Italian émigré journalist whom Hutchins brought to Chicago, who

propagated the Committee to Frame a World Constitution—with Hutch-ins as chairman—and Rexford Guy Tugwell who later on thought of drafting a new American Constitution under the aegis of Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. It was Barr and Buchanan whose idea it was to establish St. John's College—with Hutchins as head of the board of trustees. What all of these men (and others who came to him with other schemes) had in common was the friendship of a powerfully placed man who recognized a lively notion and a lively need and was willing to assume the leadership and responsibility to carry it out. Nominally he administered a university; by choice he engaged his intellect and his energies in taking it apart and putting it back together. But neither his nominal nor his chosen activities exhausted his ranging intellect and his vagrant energies. His fervent admirer Borgese saw in him a born condottiere , a kind of intellectual mercenary chief.

So it was that in December 1942 at an Encyclopaedia Britannica board meeting, Henry Luce, Hutchins' old friend from Yale, sent him a note reading, "How do I find out about freedom of the press and what my obligations are?" Luce's mind had evidently wandered from the business of the meeting, and Hutchins, whose mind may have wandered in still other directions, replied, "I don't know." Luce then sent him another note reading, "Why don't we set up a commission on freedom of the press and find out what it is?" The two men talked when the meeting adjourned, and the outcome was a $200,000 grant from Luce's Time, Inc., to the university, under whose financial auspices the Commission on Freedom of the Press was established as an independent entity. The commission held seventeen two- or three-day meetings between 1944 (there was still a war on) and 1946, and in 1947 issued its report, "A Free and Responsible Press."

The report was the original exploding cigar. Its burden was that the periodical press—primarily newspapers, but incidentally magazines, movies, and radio—failed miserably to discharge its moral obligation to the community, more often than not reflecting the views of its owners and advertisers in the treatment of news, and pandering to the lowest tastes of the readers who had to depend on it for the understanding of the great issues that confronted them in a democratic society. The press as a whole was outraged by the report, and Luce himself was unhappy with it (especially, perhaps, with its criticism of the kind of journalism his publications, among others, represented).

Hutchins had long jousted with elements of the press, having taken on Hearst in the earliest days of his Chicago presidency when that mad magnate attacked the public schools, and having later conducted a public feud

with Colonel Robert R. McCormick's antediluvian Chicago Tribune during the early years of the New Deal. (McCormick forgave Hutchins when the latter shared his own anti-interventionism before Pearl Harbor, but found him a dangerous Red again and resumed the feud upon the release of the Press Commission's report.) Although Hutchins enjoyed cordial personal relations with several newspapermen, including Barry Bingham, the publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal , he had playfully assaulted the daily papers for years. As early as 1930 he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "In spite of the frightful lies you have printed about me I still believe everything you print about other people." He informed his audience on that occasion that in his new post he hoped to be able to introduce education into the educational institutions of the country so that "in the long run we may be able to produce a generation that will demand better things of you."^[3] Addressing that same society after the publication of the Press Commission's report, he said, "All over the country you attacked the Report. I hope you will read it some time. But for fear you won't, I shall quote a passage from it that will give you the main idea: 'If modern society requires great agencies of mass communication, if these concentrations become so powerful that they are a threat to democracy, if democracy can not solve the problem simply by breaking them up—then those agencies must control themselves or be controlled by government. If they are controlled by government, we lose our chief safeguard against totalitarianism—and at the same time take a long step toward it.'"^[4]

He reserved his loving barbs for the National Conference of Editorial Writers: "My words today were written to the music of that moving American folk-song, 'I'm Bringing You a Big Bouquet of Roses, One for Each Time You Broke My Heart.' Since some of you said that you could not grasp the Report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press because my style was dark and dense, I shall try to tell you what I think of you in words both few and short. In words both few and short, you are guilty of inveteracy and recidivism. . . . I think you are teachers. I did not say you were good teachers. . . . The American people should be eagerly looking to the press for guidance. I do not need to tell you that they are not doing so. . . . The reason the people who buy your newspapers do not take your advice is that they do not believe what you say. . . . They may buy the papers to find out what happened to Dagwood, or who won the fifth race at Santa Anita, or what is on sale at Gimbel's. They read the editorials, if at all, for amusement; they do not read them for instruction. Yet I think you are teachers. If you are to have pupils, you must establish public confidence in yourselves."^[5]

The execration of the commission's report was not universal; among

those who praised it were the New York Times and the Herald-Tribune (and the Herald-Tribune 's Walter Lippmann). Even though Luce's Time magazine thought that "for the time and money and the caliber of the men, it was a disappointing report," his Fortune magazine, which printed the report, found it "important, balanced, meaty, difficult," and found that its obscurities and overcondensations were "inexcusable."^[6] But the publishers as a whole, with Colonel McCormick in the van, had difficulty understanding its warning of government control as warning and not advocacy. (One newspaper captioned its editorial, "Professors Blindly Try to Curb Press by Regulations to End All Our Liberties.")^[7] What the report advocated, as one device for staving off the totalitarianism of government control, was the establishment of an independent council to appraise and report on the performance of the press on a continuing basis. The commission said, "Some agency which reflects the ambitions of the American people for its press should exist for the purpose of comparing the accomplishments of the press with the aspirations which the people have for it."

This was the crux of the press's horror at the report. Addressing the same society whose panjandrums he had attacked in 1930, Hutchins accused it of putting itself in a class with the Eleusinian mysteries and insisting that it could criticize everybody else without anybody being allowed to criticize it. There was—and continued to be—so little criticism of the press in America that the report, in spite of the denunciation, soon became a fixture in journalistic studies the country over, and remained one. Its status in academic work consisted precisely in the fact that its members were not special pleaders. Their reputation for objectivity could hardly have been higher.

Although the commission had interviewed no end of practitioners of the profession and studied no end of professional documents in the course of its conscientious labors, the press lords and their executive hirelings appeared to be cruelly stung by the fact that the commissioners were not journalists. The president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors found them "left-wingers" inexperienced in the trade; the Chicago Tribune found them "totalitarian thinkers" who wanted "to stop effective criticism of New Deal Socialism, the one-world doctrine, and internationalism," and devoted column after front-page column to the Red connections of every one of them—and of Luce and William Benton (who had made a supplementary grant of fifteen thousand dollars to the commission on behalf of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Hutchins had taken the commission chairmanship when Judge Learned Hand declined it. The other members (whom Hutchins appointed) were Professor of Law Zechariah Chafee of Harvard, Professor of Economics

John M. Clark of Columbia, General Counsel of the Pennsylvania Railroad (and Professor of Law at Pennsylvania) John Dickinson, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy William E. Hocking of Harvard, Professor of Law Harold D. Lasswell of Yale, former Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish, Emeritus Professor of Political Science Charles E. Merriam of Chicago, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary, Professor of Anthropology Robert Red-field of Chicago, Chairman Beardsley Ruml of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Professor of History Arthur M. Schlesinger of Harvard, and President George N. Shuster of Hunter College. The commission's foreign advisers were equally distinguished and intrepid: General Manager John Grierson of the Canadian Wartime Information Board, former Chinese Ambassador to the United States Hu Shih, President Jacques Maritain of the Free French School for Advanced Studies (and later French ambassador to the Vatican), and the German Professor of Philosophy Kurt Rietzler of the New School for Social Research.

The membership of the commission reflected both an aptitude and a strong disposition on Hutchins' part to use his own eminence and persuasive powers to round up blue-ribbon types as working members of his enterprises. There was nothing nominal in the service he had in mind, in the Press Commission, or in subsequent undertakings of an ad hoc character. He was completely conscious of his influence and completely comfortable about exploiting it to obtain the labors, let alone the signatures, of distinguished men and women (nearly always men). For both personal and professional reasons he was a hard man to say No to, and his reputation for discrimination was itself persuasive in enlisting glittering cooperation in his ventures. Scornful as he was of the ordinary gimmickry of public relations, in this one respect he was the PR man's dream; the people he brought with him guaranteed significant attention to his projects. There would come a time, long afterward, when he would find it difficult, and at the last impossible, to enlist the great men he sought to materialize his vision of an unaffiliated body of academicians engaged in continuous discussion of the great issues—a time when he no longer occupied the bully pulpit at Chicago.

23
The Good News of Damnation

The atomic age did not begin with a bang. It began with a nod by Professor Enrico Fermi. The nod, that afternoon of December 2, 1942, was the signal for pulling a cadmium rod out of a metal "pile" constructed in a former squash racquet court under the abandoned football stands in Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, initiating the self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction that the world's physicists had been desperately trying to achieve. The occasion—and the spot—was suitably memorialized three years later by a self-congratulatory plaque.

The university's publicity man, Bill Morgenstern, wanted the plaque to say something like "For Better or for Worse," or "For Good or Ill"—his memorandum is lost—but he was overruled. The release of atomic energy was the marvel of marvels. It would change the world more profoundly than anything since the capture of electricity. It had to be forever celebrated in bronze, with the university's great seal bearing the motto, Crescat Scientia, Vita Excolatur , Let Knowledge Grow, That Life May Be Enriched. An innocent invocation. In that converted squash court knowledge had grown, and human life would be enriched by it in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

"This is the biggest thing in history," said Robert Maynard Hutchins in a note to a friend. And it had been managed by Hutchins, under whose aegis some $400 million of government money had been spent pell-mell in the search for the secret. He it was who took on the task at the government's request, who hired the great scientists domestic and foreign. He turned the university's facilities over to them, having persuaded his board of trustees to go along with an important piece of "war work." He signed all the contracts (one of which, the operation of the plutonium works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, doubled the university's budget).

He was the boss, nominally. His boss was the big boss in the White House who exercised his authority as follows: "This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10. I have told the Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement."^[1]

They were all nominal bosses. The biggest thing in history was too big for Harry Truman. It was too big for Winston Churchill, who said, the day the bomb was exploded, "This revelation of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from men, should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension." And of course it was too big for the scientists whom Hutchins had hired—and, of course, for Hutchins, who secretly masterminded the secret effort of the "Chicago group" to persuade Mr. Truman not to use the bomb they had invented, not even against the purely military target Mr. Truman had ordered.

It was too big for them all. But as of August 6—and again on August 9, when the second bomb exploded over Nagasaki—the American people were so exhilarated with their country's possession of the ultimate firepower that very few of them were worried lest it prove to be their master instead of their servant and one day, not too far distant, set them to digging holes in the ground to hide from it. On August 12, six days after Hiroshima, Robert Maynard Hutchins deplored its use as "unnecessary" and said that the United States, in using it, had lost its moral prestige. But he thought that the mushroom cloud might, however improbably, have a silver lining: "Leon Bloy, the French philosopher, referred to the good news of damnation doubtless on the theory that none of us would be Christians if we were not afraid of perpetual hell-fire. It may be that the atomic bomb is the good news of damnation, that it may frighten us into that Christian character and those righteous actions and those positive political steps necessary to the creation of a world society, not a thousand or five hundred years hence, but now."^[2]

There was one man who did not seem to see the silver lining. When Albert Einstein, the godfather of the bomb, heard that it had been exploded he said one word: "Weh!" (which in German means, "Woe!").^[3]

By VE Day, May 7, 1945, with "the biggest thing in history" still three months ahead, its prime contractor was validating his prewar claim that he would like to join, not the America First Committee but a committee for Humanity First. Immediately after Germany's surrender in May he preached a sermon of thanksgiving and prayer in the university chapel.

The devastation of Hiroshima was as yet unimaginable. "We can only imagine," he told his congregation, "the devastation that has been wrought in Europe.

"We come now to the real test of our professional ideals, for the sake of which we claimed to enter the war. We did so, we said, not to save our own skins, but to make possible a peaceful, just, humane society, which should embrace all the peoples of the earth. If that is what we want, we must now sacrifice, not our lives, but our goods to save millions of our fellow-men from starvation. . . . There are already some indications that we shall be less willing to sacrifice our goods than we have been our lives (or at least the lives of our soldiers and sailors). Educated people now come to the test of their education. Every educated person knows enough about human nature to know that war is brutalizing and that propaganda should be received with skepticism. . . . At this juncture we can afford to remember what Edmund Burke said of us: 'I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.'

"We can not support the thesis that because German leaders acted illegally, therefore they should be treated illegally. . . . We should remember that one of the points which Job urged in his own favor when seeking relief from his own misfortunes was that he did not rejoice when his enemy fell.

"We are now on the verge of forgetting history, and forgetting common sense as well. . . . To feed German citizens one-third of what the American soldier gets, to reduce Germany to a subsistence level; to make Germany a pastoral country; to split Germany into little states . . . [these] most inhuman proposals are brought forward. . . . The peace of the world depends upon the restoration of the German and Japanese people. The wildest atrocity stories can not alter the simple truths that all men are human, that no men are beasts, that all men are the children of God. . . . If we are going to have one good world, the Germans and the Japanese will somehow have to be incorporated into it."^[4]

But he was already doubtful that there was going to be "one good world." The United Nations charter was taking shape at the conference in San Francisco, excluding Germany and Japan, reposing actual governance in the Security Council composed of the great powers, and preserving national sovereignty by means of the single-vote veto in the Security Council and the rejection of the organization's authority over the internal affairs of the member states. The charter—basically the same as the ill-fated League of Nations covenant—gave Hutchins the occasion to fire the opening gun in what would come to be an unremitting crusade for world government.^[5]

"You can not at one and the same time join a world organization and

stay out of it. You can not have all the advantages of membership in a world organization and none of the disadvantages. You can not have all the attributes of sovereignty and give up some of them. . . . You can't, for example, have an effective world court if you are going to insist that the court can't judge your country without its consent [as the United States insisted]. You can't have an effective world organization if the organization can act only when it is unanimous [as the charter provided for the Security Council]. This . . . misleads people into thinking that they can rely on the world organization when actually the world is as disorganized as ever.

"Equally pernicious is the doctrine that all right lies with the big powers and that their security and spheres of influence are the primary concern of the world. This is the surest foundation for the next war. . . . We can not pretend to have a world society unless all the members of it are equally subject to law and unless the society is founded on justice, not to our allies alone, but also to our defeated enemies. An unjust peace and an unjust world organization make the next war inevitable."^[6]

A month after Germany's surrender he spoke on the "new realism" at the university's June 15 convocation and told his audience that Hitler had conquered the United States: "The words peace, justice, cooperation, community, and charity have fallen out of our vocabulary. . . . The new realism suggests that the one powerful nation in the world which claimed to hate machiavellianism and repudiated the doctrine that military superiority implied moral superiority must now embrace these theories or be accused of being 'soft.' A nation which fought two wars to end war must now, in the hour of victory, plan to have the greatest navy in the world; it must have perpetual conscription; and it must get all the island bases it can lay its hands on." He attacked the emerging Nuremberg doctrine which would soon put the German leaders on trial by a tribunal of the victorious allies:

"Hitler's conquest of America proceeds apace as we succumb to the idea that social and political problems can be most effectively solved with the aid of a firing squad. What [the German leaders] did to deserve punishment at the hands of human judges must have been illegal at the time it was done. If the judgment is to command the respect of Americans it must be shown that the act was one which a patriotic American would not have committed if he had been a patriotic German. . . . We must remember the ancient doctrine that no man is a good judge in his own cause. And it would do us no harm to apply the maxim of equity that one must come into court with clean hands."

The German people were certainly guilty, he said, of one crime: indiffer-

ence. "If any nation can be found which is not guilty of this crime, then it is qualified to judge the German people for their indifference to the crimes committed by Germans against Germans. As for ourselves, it is not unfair to say that the American people, except for a few million of them, are guilty of indifference in the face of race prejudice, economic exploitation, political corruption, and the degradation of oppressed minorities."

He concluded the convocation address by taking a premonitory view of the long-term relations between the two great allies so recently united in the bloody and victorious struggle, the Soviet Union and the United States. "To state the thing in its lowest terms, in terms of money and power, which the new realists claim are the only terms there are, our political and economic interests require a prosperous Germany and Japan. Our interests may, in the light of current readjustments of power in Europe and Asia, require a strong Germany and Japan. But we can not trade with those who have nothing to exchange. And we can not be sure that our present allies will always be our friends and that we shall not some time need the help of our present enemies."^[7]

All this with Hiroshima still to come. In the euphoric spring of 1945 the new realism was sweeping everything before it. Americans who spoke in Hutchins' unpalatable fashion were few. With the USSR in partial ruin and twenty million of its people dead, the only great nation left on earth supported the tough policies of the Truman administration. The whole United States was still a war plant, operating at its productive peak. It was no time for an American—above all, an American who had led the pre-Pearl Harbor forces of isolation—to talk like Cassandra. Cassandra may have been right, but she wasn't popular. In the nationwide flush of victory and the nearly universal cry for punishment and vengeance, the Hutchins audience was small.

And Hiroshima was still to come, to crown the United States in its unchallenged and unchallengeable mastery of the world: the new colossus. But Hiroshima would alter Hutchins' status radically. Overnight he would appear as the man who had stage-managed the mastery of the ultimate force, "the biggest thing in history." The pre-Pearl Harbor nay-sayer would be redeemed.

His audience would grow correspondingly. But he wouldn't be speaking for the scientists ideologically, most of whom, then as always, seem to have no pronounced social views—or none that differed from those of the community at large. In his August 12, 1945, appearance on the university's Round-Table of the Air over NBC—six days after Hiroshima, three days after Nagasaki—having denounced the use of the bomb as militarily unnecessary, he renewed his old assault on the status quo at home and

abroad (especially at home) and struck up for a new world: "If the government has succeeded in creating a notable curse with two billion dollars and the concentrated effort of thousands of scientists over four or five years, why could we [not ask that] the government devote the same money and effort to the elimination of some [of] the already existing curses such as cancer, influenza, venereal disease, unemployment at home, or starvation abroad? . . . If we are going to have a society which knows what to do with these constant surprises from the physical scientists, we are going to have to have an entirely different level of general intelligence from the one which we have been used to. . . .

"Up to last Monday"—the day of Hiroshima—"I must confess that I did not have much hope for the world state. I believed that no moral basis for it existed and that we had no world conscience and no sense of world community sufficient to keep a world state together. But the alternatives now seem clear. One is world suicide; another is agreement among sovereign states to refrain from using the bomb. This will not be effective. The only hope, therefore, of abolishing war is through the monopoly of atomic force by a world organization."^[8]

Thus the good news of damnation for those who were willing to hear it. Its audience did not appear to include the victorious nations. The United States for the moment dominated the world by virtue of its monopoly of atomic force, and had no disposition to make that force available to others, least of all to the Russians. The "world organization" was in place, already stigmatized as a talking club, with the sovereign victors each and severally retaining their rights of independent action. The scientists basked in their new, above-it-all grandeur; but sixty-five of them at Chicago, under the whip of Leo Szilard, and with the secret connivance of Hutchins, had spent the weeks before Hiroshima trying desperately to persuade Mr. Truman not to use the bomb except in a harmless demonstration which would convince the Japanese of the hopelessness of further resistance.

After the successful Trinity test in July, Szilard drafted a petition to President Truman, asking him not to order the bomb dropped. It was urged, inter alia, on both long- and short-term moral grounds, that the Japanese were not Nazis and should not be subjected to the massacre proportions of a weapon that might have seemed more appropriate to use against Germany. "A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for the purpose of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale." At Los Alamos, where production of the bomb was almost complete, the two leading scientists, Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer, though they would later split when the latter vainly op-

posed the development of the "super" hydrogen bomb, agreed that the petition should not be circulated there, and it wasn't; and the Oak Ridge plutonium works scientists in Tennessee followed suit. Szilard and his Chicago colleagues—and not all of them—stood alone.^[9]

The Chicago group never succeeded in getting as far as Mr. Truman with their petition. With Szilard leading their forces, they were finally able to meet with Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, who complained, rightly, that this Szilard was trying to tell him what to do in the highest matter of national policy.^[10] What Szilard told him was not to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and Byrnes replied (so Szilard reported to Hutchins), "Congress would never understand how you could appropriate and spend two billion dollars and have nothing to show for it." Szilard said, "Well, why don't you get an uninhabited island and drop the bomb there and invite the Japanese to watch?" And Byrnes replied, "It might not go off."

Germany was out of the war. The Americans would have only two bombs ready at Los Alamos. The government and its advisers (including its scientific advisers) were afraid that the demonstration might prove to be a dud and that, even if the bomb should be exploded successfully, the Japanese might not believe that there were more in the American arsenal. (Announcing the Hiroshima explosion on August 6, President Truman said both that "there must never be another war" and that the United States would go on atomic-bombing Japanese cities until there was an unconditional surrender.) There was another high matter of national policy which was purely political: with the cold war already in its early stages and the Americans aveare that the Russians intended to attack Japan from the east and get in on the kill, the actual use of the bomb against Japan would intimidate our glorious ally the Soviet Union, which was already over-spreading eastern (and threatening central and southern) Europe.

Though the Chicago group of sixty-five included some of the foremost nuclear physicists there, it was unable to obtain the support of such men as Fermi and Compton, to whom most of their senior and junior colleagues deferred in the matter. Japan, almost entirely blockaded and its cities largely burned out, was known to have made no headway in atomic research and was attempting, through the USSR, to arrange surrender negotiations; but the Japanese would probably go on fighting in face of conventional weapon superiority rather than surrender unconditionally. For this reason alone the American public would doubtless have voted for the decision which bade fair to save hundreds of thousands of American (and Japanese) lives in an infantry invasion of the home islands.

The war-wearied masses of mankind were willing to accept peace—that is, the Japanese surrender—at any price and rest their come-easy-go-easy confidence for the future in the United Nations. Within five years of its

creation, and within five years of Mr. Truman's proclamation that there must never be another war, Mr. Truman himself (only later getting the approval of a helpless Congress) brought the United States into another war, this time in Korea, as a "UN police force," though the two opposing sides both had the active support of UN members and were both entitled (if either was) to wave the already tattered UN flag. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki some physicists, including some who had approved of the use of the bomb, began to chafe under the onus of being used as magnificently remunerated stooges for government policy in general and military policy in particular. Hutchins said bluntly that now that the war was over the University of Chicago would not do any more classified research; he was, nevertheless, insistent on the continued government control of atomic power rather than see it fall into the hands of the few great industrial organizations with resources sufficient to exploit it.^[11]

The two-billion-dollar bomb project, together with the other government-subsidized war research and training programs, had already changed the character of scientific research in the universities. Before the war, research was a private, poorly paid occupation, almost a hobby of individual professors and groups of professors.

But now, even in Washington, there were men who, at the very outset of the war, thought it possible that the war would (as Hutchins put it) be won in the laboratories. With the success of the bomb the government spigot was opened wide and the flow of money into the universities was increased enormously. Recalling the years immediately after Hiroshima, the micro-biologist Ernest Borek of the University of Colorado Medical Center, said: "In addition to grants, emoluments began to come our way. The profession of research, which had been highly selective, became easily accessible. Graduate education was subsidized, post-doctoral fellowships became plentiful. . . Career development awards [paid] a young scientist's salary for five years. . . The so-called lifetime professorships [conferred] freedom from teaching . . . for a whole career."

At the same time the atmosphere of the university changed, in the social sciences. (Only the humanities escaped the governmental embrace, retreating ever further into the recesses of the campus.) "Since one [had to] publish to get grants," Professor Borek said, "and promotion in many institutions [hinged] on the size of the grants, publication and grants rather than discovery became the goals of the laboratory. . . . As large grants for medical research became available, entrepreneurial ability in some cases was added to scientific ability in securing funds, laboratories, and research associates. . . . The researcher became an employer."^[12]

The government's wartime largesse had not come free of charge. "The

one thing we know with certainty about the universities of the West, and particularly the American universities, is that they are very useful in the manufacture of armaments," said Hutchins after the war. "I think you could say that what happened during the war, when the scientists showed they could blow up the world, was the real beginning of the now general conviction that the road to power, and perhaps to prosperity, resides in these great enterprises that were formerly intellectual and are now the tools of government policy.

"Institutions are supported to solve problems selected by the government and to train men and women selected by the government, in fields and by methods prescribed by the government, using a staff assembled in terms of requirements laid down by the government." So he spilled the patriotic beans and gave voice to the warning that "a government which has once discovered that universities can be used to solve immediate problems is likely to intensify the practice as its problems grow more serious."^[13]

A generation afterward the prediction had materialized in every university, and especially in what were known as the high-status private institutions. (But the scientific research work of a few state schools like the University of California at Berkeley was also dominated by government funding.) Revisiting his alma mater in 1967, John Gunther found that the University of Chicago, apart from the $85-million-a-year government support of the Argonne National Laboratory established by the university in connection with wartime research, had federal contracts representing almost one-third of its entire expenditure and more than one-half of its research funds. The then president of the institution, George W. Beadle, was bemoaning "the greater and greater salary differentials between scientists, mathematicians, and engineers on the one hand and social scientists on the other. . . . Almost all major universities in this country have succumbed to the temptation [of federal handouts for science]."^[14]

If there was no reasonable alternative but to continue the monopoly of atomic power in the hands of the government, the scientists almost uniformly wanted to see the control transferred from the military to a civilian agency. The military opposed the transfer, and one of the opening guns in the struggle was fired when Hutchins, who of course supported civilian control, set up a four-day Atomic Energy Control Conference at the university for September 19-22, 1945. The agenda included discussion of the consequences of the bomb under national sovereignty; international control; and scientific secrecy in the event of an arms race. The conference was attended by many of the luminaries of the nuclear and social sciences. (Albert Einstein could not attend, but he wrote Hutchins that there would

be bigger and "better" wars as long as nations clung to "unrestricted sovereignty." The role of intellectuals, he said, was to make it clear that the problem was a political and not a scientific one, and to make it clear that war preparations, including all kinds of military secrecy, must be abolished.)

But even though the proceedings were to be secret, "the generals" didn't like the idea. Two days before it was scheduled to open, Hutchins received a flat Verbot from the general-of-generals in Washington, L.R. Groves, who had directed the entire "Manhattan Engineering District," so-called, covering all aspects of the bomb research and production. "Frankly," General Groves wrote, "I am worried about the grave security hazards. . . . Experience has taught us that it is impossible to control such an affair. . . . The situation is made even worse by the well-known fact that the War Department still has a secret contract with the University of Chicago. . . . The President of the United States has directed all government executive agencies that all vital information pertaining to the Manhattan Project remain secret. . . . Not only is information harmful but misinformation and speculation . . . is certain to be most damaging to the security and best interests of the United States."^[15]

The war had been over more than a month, and the old Hutchins was emerging from his red-white-and-blue wraings. He flatly rejected the general's order: "As we informed your office on the campus some days ago, this conference is to be private. None of its discussions will be open to the public or the press. There are no plans for releasing any of its conclusions. The conference will deal only with matters of common knowledge. . . . I shall be glad to read your letter to the conference if you wish me to do so."^[16]

As far as the record shows, the general did not reply. None of the proceedings reached the public; but it was known that the issue of civilian versus military control, and the attendance of Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, a partisan of civilian (and international) control, reinforced the distress of the generals generally, who supported the May-Johnson bill in the Senate to leave the further development of atomic energy in the hands of the military. The struggle was a bitter and protracted one before the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, which finally came down on the side of a civilian commission with the continuance of government regulation and licensing of atomic energy production and development. The Senate committee's deliberations were edified, on January 25, 1946, by the round-table testimony, on behalf of the McMahon bill for civilian control, of a gaggle of eminent scientists presented by President Hutchins of the University of Chicago. Hutchins told the senators, in re-

joinder to the argument that control should be left with the generals because of the possibility of another war, that "we had better start the war this morning because only this morning can we be sure of having supremacy in atomic bombs."^[17] Hutchins' role in support of the embattled McMahon bill was considerable. He spoke for it across the country. Following the September 1945 off-the-record conference at Chicago, he organized an even more formidable meeting along the same stern lines in New York. He was clearly the voice of the scientific community mobilized behind the civilian campaign.

And he spoke as one having authority again. For he was once more the ringmaster—this time publicly—of an immense undertaking in the atomic energy field. When the bomb was exploded at Hiroshima there was no understanding of the possible application of atomic energy to peacetime use; the country, apart from the scientists, knew nothing at all, and, aside from the development of the bomb, the scientists were not much further ahead than they were in the midthirties. Three days later—the day that Nagasaki was destroyed—Hutchins called a press conference and announced the academic coup that immediately put Chicago in the forefront of nuclear research: the university's creation of institutes of nuclear studies, of metals, and of radiobiology and biophysics. "The purpose is to advance knowledge. . . . We expect these and other institutes will continue in the great tradition of scientific research."^[18]

With the achievement of the chain reaction in late 1942, the great coterie of physicists, chemists, and mathematicians Hutchins had gathered in Chicago completed their fundamental work. They continued to be heavily involved in the subsequent work on plutonium—the hunt for the atomic trigger—but the focus of the Manhattan Project gradually shifted to the plutonium plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, under Chicago direction, and then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where many of the top men and women were centered in the production of the bomb itself. With the two explosions and the Japanese surrender, the two-billion-dollar project came to a sudden end. The search for peacetime applications of the new force was next, and the leading research institutions were certain to engage in a mad scramble to attract the services of the scientists who had worked on the bomb. Hutchins anticipated the scramble in the last weeks of the war.

With the imminent departure from Chicago of the men and women who had gathered from all over the world to conduct the Metallurgical Project, he announced a twelve-million-dollar atomic research project a few days after Hiroshima. The great cyclotron and other costly gadgets of the wartime investigation were available, along with a conglomeration of eighty-five senior and a hundred junior scientists. Most of them decided to

stay, and others came on. "While Chicago's best humanists of a decade ago have been lost to Harvard, Princeton, and the West Coast universities," one of them wrote (somewhat hyperbolically), "the cream of Columbia's nuclear research staff . . . is now at Chicago. . . . In pursuit of the Virgin (or at least the queen of the medieval disciplines, metaphysics), Mr. Rockefeller's university has wound up with the Dynamo. . . In the quest of the Absolute, it discovered the Absolute Weapon."^[19]

There was money, and not just military victory, in the Promethean release of the marvel of all the ages. While Nagasaki was still burning, the whilom metaphysician revealed that he had inveigled ten giant industrial combines into an exclusive twelve-million-dollar "atomic club"; companies like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, Aluminum Corporation of America, and Westinghouse Electric paid fifty thousand dollars a year apiece to share in the research results of the University of Chicago's new institutes.

But that would be when there was no longer a war on, after the government had given up its support of nuclear research (until the Cold War reintroduced it). Among the fattest cats of the corporate world, the crusader for the university as the last hope of civilization would find a new answer to the question, "Where does the money come from?" to sustain the pure research that constituted the chief glory of the higher learning. In peacetime it would come henceforth from industry and business, in hot or cold wartime from the government.

Corporate money was highly suspect, more so than government money. Hutchins had tried to interest Henry Ford (to whom he was taken by their mutual friend Lindbergh) in supporting the three new institutes. "I should, of course," he wrote Lindbergh, "much prefer to have the Ford Foundation make the initial contribution because I do not like to have our work so closely tied up with and dependent upon industry."^[20] But the Ford Foundation was still, in 1945, closely held, and Henry Ford, at eighty-three, was not interested in radical new undertakings. Nor were the other great philanthropies. But the corporations were willing to speculate. In his announcement of the three institutes Hutchins told the press that "the important thing is to get this work done under a university andot under the auspices of either industry or government. . . . The important thing is not the Bomb, although that has its own tragic significance, but that for the first time atomic energy has been released in controllable form. . . . It must be considered in its social and biological phases, and studied by physicists and chemists, all under university scrutiny. It is important that the workers shall not commit themselves to the study of its applications, which would be commercial, or to its military uses, which would be the government's motive, but be free to devote themselves entirely to basic scientific work.

The only place where they would have complete freedom to pursue their problems is in the university."^[21]

The new institutes at Chicago were a bargain-basement deal for the corporate mammoths. They and their payroll scientists didn't know beans about the revolutionary procedures that produced the bomb; all they knew was that they were revolutionary and would have a profound effect on industrial processes. The Chicago institutes were the ground floor, and they got in on it for peanuts. Their fifty thousand dollars a year gave them first call on the work of a team of the world's greatest atomic scientists. On the side of the university—and the scientists—the arrangement was equally salubrious. The scientists were now free to do whatever they wanted to. They knew Hutchins and they knew he would protect them (should such protection be necessary) from the philanthropic sharks. The clustering of the most advanced atomic study at Chicago overtly distressed Vannevar Bush, director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, who mistakenly supposed that (as Hutchins put it) Chicago "was buying up all the leading scientists of the country by paying them exorbitant salaries." The corporate peanuts that fed the institutes provided modest professorial pittances (fifteen thousand dollars a year each for the physicist Fermi and the chemist Urey, the two Nobel Prize winners in the group—who, like Hutchins, turned over all outside earnings to the university).

There was no doubt that Hutchins had got the jump on the rest of the academic world. While the other universities were awaiting the end of the war to set their course in atomic studies, he had been spectacularly forehanded in rounding up the men and women for his institutes. As a consequence he now enjoyed the national respectability he had lost as an isolationist, regained as the prime contractor in the search for the bomb, and had already, immediately after Hiroshima, begun to throw away with his radical pronouncements that were anathema to Washington. The country's scientists were unsympathetic with his ideological position—or would have been, had they noticed it—but they were profoundly impressed by the establishment of the postwar institutes. Now he spoke for them—particularly as regards military control—and the pooh-bahs of the federal establishment knew that he did. "If a poll were taken among American scientists," said the Saturday Review of Literature some two years later, "as to which single person is contributing most today to the advancement of science in America, it is at least a fair bet that the winner would not be a scientist but [Robert M.] Hutchins."

24
The Guilty Flee Where None Pursue

The creation of the nuclear institutes put period to the perennial charge by the most obdurate of his collegial enemies that Hutchins was unduly interested in teaching and unduly uninterested in research. It also put period—mistakenly—to the perennial charge that he was antiscientific.

He really was antiscientific, in two critical senses. For twenty-five years he had paid lip service to science and the indispensability of its study for the comprehension of the modern world. For twenty-five years he had strengthened the sciences in his Chicago appointments, repeatedly giving the lie (not that his enemies paid any attention to that) to the complaint that he was wedded to a prescientific view of man and the world. But for those same twenty-five years he had deprecated the utility of science in confrontation with the problems of human life, its vaunted "value-free" character: "Men do not get their purposes from science. Science has no purpose of its own."^[1]

After Hiroshima he insisted, again and again, that the urgent question was "not how to make atomic energy, but what to do with it. Can we control it? Can we control ourselves in the use of it? To these questions science offers no answer. . . . Science can not give us the character, the intelligence, and the nobility which we may need to learn how to get along with other nations, to sink our own will-to-power in a world organization, to share our goods with suffering humanity everywhere. Science can not change the hearts of men, and yet it seems fairly clear that unless the hearts of men can be changed the scientific knowledge men have gained will at last destroy them."

Why, then, did he take the initiative to establish the institutes the instant the war was over? His motivation was various. First, because the challenge lay there, and no other academic leader had seen that immediate

action on a large and imaginative scale would crystallize America's unrivaled position in nuclear studies and centralize them in one institution. It was a typically Hutchins action. True, his bent was antiscientific, certainly nonscientific; he deplored not only the moral purposelessness of science and the materialistic idolatry it stimulated, but also its commonplace servitude to technological adaptation for commercial profit and the pursuit of national power while the humanistic studies languished. Now, more than ever, those studies he had so long fought for at Chicago were put in the shade; the country's foremost protagonist of the liberal arts was now the head of the country's foremost center of non-liberal-arts research and teaching.

Like so many scientists and nonscientists, the country over and the world around, he saw, or thought he saw, the staggering possibilities of the use of the new power for peacetime purposes, phenomenally cheap energy. It would not be unleashed to destroy cities but to build them, lifting the burdens of life from mankind's shoulders as steam and electricity had only begun to do.

"New industries, new communities, more leisure, better health and longer life—these are among the blessings which atomic energy puts within our grasp. It can mean a higher standard of living for all the world." But, in the same speech: "We need, not a National Science Research Foundation, but a National Education Foundation. . . . The great task is to educate, to educate now, and to educate everybody now. If we can restrain the warmongers"—this a few months after the end of the war—"if we can avoid blundering into war with Soviet Russia . . . the job is not impossible. We must educate the peoples of the earth to be citizens of one world. It is one world, or none at all." On the one hand, the new world of atomic energy; on the other, the old world of war.^[2]

One burden that atomic energy didn't lift was the burden of guilt that lay on Robert Maynard Hutchins, the man who had opposed the war and, in some hyperbolic sense, had won it. In his Round Table broadcast, six days after Hiroshima—three days after Nagasaki—he said: "This is the kind of weapon, I believe, which should be used, if at all, only as a last resort in self-defense. At the time this bomb was dropped the American authorities knew that Russia was going to enter the war. It was said that Japan was blockaded and that its cities were burned out. All the evidence points to the fact that the use of this bomb was unnecessary."—It had not yet come to light that the Japanese government had put out feelers through neutral governments to try to arrange a surrender that would spare the emperor.—"Therefore, the United States has lost its moral prestige."^[3]

And Hutchins felt that he had lost his. Thirty-five years later his daugh-

ter, Clarissa Hutchins Bronson, a Boston lawyer, recalled his being challenged in the question period following a lecture at Harvard in 1960: "You oppose nuclear weapons, but you served as President of the university that discovered the way to make the atomic bomb. How do you square these two facts?" Hutchins: "I have never before made a public statement on this point." The hall was dead silent, said Clarissa Hutchins. "My administrative connection with the undertaking you speak of illustrates the dire necessity of scientific training as the essence of a liberal education. I was a scientific illiterate, and yet I was the presiding officer of an institution whose greatest energies were concentrated on a crucial scientific project—crucial for my country and for the world. That such a man should be a university president is, or ought to be, unthinkable."

An artless dodge, intimating as it did that he would have done differently had he had scientific training. With his paternal gift for the Scriptures, he had once said of one of his academic opponents, "The guilty flee where none pursue." Of the hundreds of scientists—roughly a thousand—who participated in the development of the bomb, only the sixty-five at Chicago who tried to persuade the government not to use it showed any sign of having wanted to "do differently," and they only after the mortal damage of its production had been done. For all his prediction of the peacetime wonders that would flow from installations like the three nuclear institutes, Hutchins was scared stiff on behalf of a benumbed and incredulous world; scared, however, of the moral jeopardy in which he had helped place it.

Prior to Pearl Harbor his opposition to American involvement in the war, like that of so many "isolationists" on the left, had been widely taken for pacifism. In his speeches his condemnation of the war extended by easy inference to all war. I had once asked him why, when he left Oberlin at the end of his sophomore year in 1917, he enlisted in the ambulance corps instead of the infantry. He said it was because he didn't want to kill anybody. I asked him why he didn't want to kill anybody, and he said it was because he was a pacifist. I asked him why he was a pacifist, and he said, "I don't know." On August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb killed everybody around, and the man who undertook to administer its invention, and discharged his undertaking with apocalyptic success, was Robert Maynard Hutchins.

In my old age, and in his still older, I asked him why he had undertaken that interesting assignment. "For the worst of all possible reasons," he said. "I believed it couldn't be done. I didn't think they could pull it off." I said, "By 'they' you mean the physicists?" "Yes."

Mayer: Are you saying that you were some kind of a physicist?

Hutchins: No, I'm saying that I was some kind of a university president. The point is that the chief executive officer of an institution is at all times faced with the question whether he can morally continue to occupy the position. The time I came closest to resigning was when the board of trustees indicated that it didn't intend to do anything about Negro segregation on the South Side of Chicago because the university had the whole neighborhood tied up in restrictive covenants. I regarded restrictive covenants as immoral and unconstitutional.

Mayer: You "came close" to resigning.

Hutchins: The Supreme Court happened along, just then, and decided that I was right about the unconstitutionality—it didn't go into the non-juridical question of immorality. . . . So I could have resigned when the atomic bomb proposal was made, or I could have done what I could to carry out the wishes of the university. The fact that I was opposed to the war did not mean that the university was. There is a difference between the opinions that a man holds and his operations as the chief administrative officer of an institution.

Mayer: I recall that at the end of Plato's Phaedrus Socrates offers up a prayer that "the outward and inward man be at one."

Hutchins: That's a fine idea.

In 1941 "the generals" came to Hutchins to ask if the University of Chicago would accept the responsibility for a project in nuclear physics intended to produce a weapon of a sort, and of a magnitude, never before known. Why—the question wasn't asked—Hutchins, whose ardent anti-interventionism was regarded in some quarters as just short of treason? The Manhattan Engineering District—its code name—ultimately involved more than a thousand scientists and engineers and a total of seventy-two universities, research institutes, industrial corporations, and hospitals, in addition to the government. As prime contractor for the "Metallurgical Project," the University of Chicago assumed prime responsibility for the whole operation, and Hutchins was the only nonscientist outside the government who knew what it was all about. If the question, Why Hutchins, of all people? wasn't asked, neither was the answer given. The answer would have had to be that his polemics against war, and against this war, need not be taken seriously. A safe man, who would always do his duty as "the generals" saw it; as safe a man as they could ask for.

Hutchins: We didn't anticipate what happened. When it happened we did everything we could do to prevent the bomb from being dropped.

Mayer: What you're explaining is that it was impossible to foresee what would happen. But prior to Pearl Harbor you foresaw the evils that would follow if thisountry went to war, even though we should win. Couldn't

you have foreseen what would happen if this country were to develop a bigger and better bomb? You say you tried to prevent the bomb from being dropped after it was constructed.

Hutchins: So I did. . . . At the outset of the Metallurgical Project we had something like twenty-five great physicists on the campus—from all over—and they were spending about fifty million dollars. By the time we knew that the thing was probably going to succeed, we had a commitment to these men that was inescapable. I could have resigned. But it would have been as though I had said, "I'll let you come here on the theory that you won't succeed," and then, when success loomed, I had said, "I'm awfully sorry now that you're going to succeed, and I'm going to withdraw."

Mayer: I think you care . . . that you've been against an awful lot of things that cause war, but when war comes and the bugle blows, it's Hutchins in the front line.

Hutchins: That's right.

Mayer: With that prospect before you, would you do the same thing again?

Hutchins: No.

Mayer: Why not?

Hutchins: Because I'm brighter now. . . . You get bright too late. There are all kinds of things that I would have done and would not have done if I had been as bright as I am now.

Robert Maynard Hutchins. 
Courtesy Mortimer J. Adler.

Robert Hutchins at Oberlin College. 
Courtesy Oberlin College Archives.

Father: William James Hutchins.
 Courtesy Oberlin College Archives.

Mother: Anna Murch Hutchins. 
Courtesy Oberlin College Archives.

Grandfather: 
The Reverend Robert Grosvenor Hutchins.
 Courtesy Oberlin College Archives.

Associate Professor
 William O. Douglas, Yale Law School.
 Courtesy Yale University Archives.

Professor
 Charles E. Clark, Yale Law School. 
Courtesy Yale University Archives.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, Dean, Yale Law School. 
Courtesy Yale University Archives.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, newly appointed President of
 the University of Chicago, with acting President Frederick C. Woodward. 
Reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Maude McVeigh Hutchins and President Robert M. Hutchins.
 Courtesy University of Chicago Archives.

Robert Hutchins at University Round-Table of the Air, 
a forum for adult education, NBC broadcast, 1944. 
Courtesy University of Chicago Archives.

Chancellor Robert Hutchins in football uniform with
 Mrs. Hector Coates, Quadrangle Club Revels 
("You're in the Styx, Professor"), 1949. 
Courtesy Wide World Photos/Associated Press.

Mortimer J. Adler. 
Collection of Ruth Hammen.

Vesta Orlick Hutchins and Chancellor Robert M. Hutchins.
 Reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Milton Mayer at Carmel, California, 1979. 
Courtesy Monterey Peninsula Herald.

Milton Mayer, Jane Mayer, and Robert M. Hutchins. 
Collection of Mrs. Jane Mayer.

25
One World or None

Less than a week after Hiroshima, Hutchins had gone on NBC to sound his clarion call for world government as mankind's one hope with the horrendous opening of the atomic age.^[1] The call evoked a great response among the kind of people who listened to that kind of radio program—the country at large was celebrating the end of the hot war (and would soon be celebrating the beginning of the cold one). But two close friends lunching at the Quadrangle Club the next day were moved to something more than a mere affirmation of the clarion call. The two were Dean Richard McKeon and G.A. Borgese.

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese was a passionate, popeyed man of darkest Italian visage and fiery glare. The man himself jutted, not just his features. He was possessed of a firecracker vocabulary, grammar, and syntax; an extravagant master of the language he adopted when he emigrated to America in 1931. ("According to me" meant "in my opinion," and Mortimer Adler credited him with the invention of the past imperative, "Oh, Dick, do not have said that.") He joined the Chicago faculty, his field Italian literature, in 1936; and in 1937 he published the first of his books to be written in English, Goliath: The March of Fascism . He was thirty years older than his equally brilliant (but much less explosive) wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of Thomas Mann. ("Elisabetina, cara mia , be ruled by me.") As monumentally learned as he was literately original, he had a character to match his temper; a leading critic and historian in his native country, he was one of the few professors who refused to take the Fascist loyalty oath and paid the penalty of losing his livelihood.

After Hiroshima the war would end, in a day or two. But there was, among men like Borgese and McKeon, no conviction that the victory would save civilization. The glorious professions of the glorious allies

would turn to ashes with the hostility between the two great survivors among them. The United States and the USSR had been anti-Communist and anticapitalist long before (and far more relentlessly than) they had been anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi.

Meanwhile the bomb certainly must be calling the race to the construction, not merely of a better world, but of a different one. Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential nominee, in 1943 popularized the expression "one world" with his book by that title, but his recognition did not extend to the bottom-line issue of national sovereignty. Now, with Hiroshima, Hutchins (and many others) would be giving the expression a more fearful twist: "one world—or none." Whoever monopolized atomic energy would rule the world as long as that monopoly lasted; but when that monopoly ended, as it must, its possession in the hands of sovereign antagonists like the United States and the Soviet Union would certainly presage a murderous armaments race "with the world full of atomic bombs," as Hutchins put it. Almost certainly a war, by design or accident, would put an end to civilization and, possibly, to human society.

Borgese and McKeon decided, at lunch, that August 7, that what must be embarked upon at once, in response to Hutchins' call—embarked on, of course, by Hutchins—was a scholarly investigation to see if a plan could be devised for world government. The international control of atomic energy would require nothing less. All agreements to limit armaments had always been wrecked on the rock of national sovereignty. All. There was nothing new about world government as a concept; it went back to ancient times, and forward to, among others, William Penn's Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe at the end of the seventeenth century, and Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace at the end of the eighteenth. But no one had attempted to develop a constitutional basis for such a government, for such a state; nothing much had ever been done besides the proposal of an international (basically European) organization to arbitrate international disputes. Nor had anything ever been done along those lines to contemplate the international monopoly of the power to destroy the earth. Could a bullet-proof constitutional basis be found for actually organizing the world?—instead of ending world wars with a supposed organization like the League of Nations or the United Nations, which preserved the fatal independence of action that left no real judge, no real legislature, and no real police force or sheriff to resolve disputes as disputes had always been resolved within each independent state. Like the League's covenant, the UN charter was better than nothing: "We should," said Hutchins, "do everything we can to strengthen the United Nations, making it clear that we have accepted the obligation, by joining this orga-

nization, not to use the atomic bomb without the consent of other nations. Since the United Nations is an organization of sovereign states, with the power in the hands of a few large ones, we should recognize that it can not prevent the next war, that it can not be the world state which the survival of mankind demands, and that drastic constitutional revisions will be required before it can even be regarded as a serious step in this direction. Nevertheless, it is all we have."^[2] The charter was to be revised every ten years. (It hasn't been.)

Borgese and McKeon went to Hutchins, who agreed to organize a study group and raise the money for its undertaking to frame a world constitution. The committee was in place within a month. It consisted of, from the Chicago faculty (besides Borgese, McKeon, Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler), Dean Robert Redfield of Social Sciences, Dean Wilbur Katz of the law school, and Roosevelt adviser Rexford Guy Tugwell, who was coming to Chicago as an economics professor from the governorship of Puerto Rico; Erich Kahler of Princeton, Charles McIlwain of Harvard, Albert Guérard of Stanford, Harold A. Innis of the University of Toronto, and Stringfellow Barr. ("Winkie" Barr and Scott Buchanan had just resigned as president and dean of St. John's and established the Foundation for World Government with a half-million-dollar bequest for the purpose; they provided half of the more than two hundred thousand dollars the Hutchins Committee managed to spend). Dean James Landis of the Harvard Law School, W.E. Hocking of Harvard, Beardsley Ruml of the Federal Reserve Board, and Reinhold Niebuhr of the Union Theological Seminary participated in some aspects of the work; but, like McKeon, who disagreed radically with the ultra-"maximalist" Borgese, they withheld their signatures from the committee's 1946 Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution . The Draft was followed—after two years of highly, and sometimes shrilly, argumentative meetings and hearings, some 150 position papers, and a quarterly journal, Common Cause (edited by Borgese)—by an elaboration of its findings in book form, A Proposition to History . Borgese completed his Foundations of the World Republic before his death in 1952.^[3]

Like the report of the Hutchins Committee on Freedom of the Press, the Preliminary Draft generated a modicum of abuse. The still isolationist—and nationalist—Chicago Tribune said that Hutchins took his daydreams seriously. "He must elaborate them, write them out, debate the details in the atmosphere of secrecy dear to the juvenile heart . .. . It is said that he is conscience stricken over the achievement of his own faculties in the development of the atomic bomb. . . . The scheme is patently silly." The Preliminary Draft received more than a modicum of closely interested attention in intellectual circles, and the movement gained momentum both

in America and abroad, especially in England. There a respectable number of MPs joined in support of a convention proposed for Geneva in 1950 to lay the foundations for a world parliament.

For a few years world "federalism"—in which the member nations would retain much of their sovereignty—had some small vogue among the American gentry, and its spokesmen were respectfully received. But even these "minimalists" failed to catch on in a large way anywhere, and the "maximalists" of the Hutchins stripe had almost no popular audience.

Variously splintered both on the maximalist/minimalist front and on a whole caboodle of procedural issues, the movement achieved neither coherence nor sufficient cohesion to present a clearly intelligible program to the public; nor did it ever permeate the public below the elitist levels of scholarship and liberal political activism. American mass leadership was uninterested, and the country's statesmen were as inattentive as the general public. The case for world community, world government, world law, was self-evident in the atomic age, and would ever after remain so; but until the Russians exploded their bomb in 1949, Americans were satisfied with the momentary fact that the atomic age was the American atomic age. Ignorant of the scientific and technological capability of the Russians, the American congressman no less than his constituent refused to heed the predictions of Hutchins and the scientists that the USSR would have the bomb within a few years, and when the Soviet explosion did take place it was quite generally believed that the "secret" had been stolen and that Allied (for which read American) genius would at once outstrip the Communists and nullify their possession of that first—already outmoded—bomb.

When the Hutchins Committee issued its Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution , the Berlin air lift was at its height, intensifying the Cold War sentiment of themericans, with its concomitant nationalist resurgence, while the collapse of the European allies' imperial power all over the world was bringing forth a great succession of new nations, many of them almost wholly illiterate and all of them consumed with the fervor of their newly achieved national sovereignty. When the draft was issued, Prime Minister Nehru of India and Wellington Koo, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, joined Hutchins in a Round-Table of the Air discussion of "The Problem of World Government," and Nehru admitted that India's triple preoccupation with its economic distress, its division into two separate nations, and, above all, its newly won national independence from Great Britain promised the poorest of all possible receptions to the idea. Ambassador Koo had to say the same for China, which was torn by civil war and was on the verge of falling to nationalist Communism.^[4]

It was the worst of all times, albeit the most necessitous, to talk to the

peoples of the world about a better world, much less a different world altogether. The Americans were disturbed by the prospect of war with the USSR and the sudden emergence of McCarthyism and the witch hunts at home. The Truman loyal-security program reinvigorated the prewar House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate internal security program. Americans were mesmerized by what they perceived as the double threat—internal and external—to their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Whatever illusions they may have had at the war's end were dissipated. The world had—once more, and with sixty million lives consumed—not been made safe for democracy. It had not even been made safe.

But Hutchins and his committeemen were not downhearted, nor had they reason to be. People had at least heard about world government, world community, the world state, as their forebears had not, "and though we know that states do not make communities," said Hutchins when the committee began its work, "we should not forget that there is an interaction between political organization and political ideals. The Constitution of the United States has educated our people to believe in the Constitution of the United States. We had a community, when the Constitution was adopted, far more homogeneous and unified than the world today. Even then it took a bloody civil war to make the country finally one. But since there is an interaction between political institutions and political ideals, we should seek to frame and get adopted the constitution of a world state, in the hope that the discussion leading to its institution and its existence thereafter will promote the formation of the community which can be its only durable foundation."^[5]

It was another straw to be grasped, at a time when there was nothing but straws to hand. Hutchins had always held firmly to the ancient adage that the law is a teacher. The adage did not promise that the lesson of the law would be learned, or learned soon. The lesson of world law, which might teach people to accept it, as the U.S. Constitution had taught people to accept the U.S. Constitution, might not be learned for five years or ten or a hundred; and Hutchins and his younger colleagues would live to see, a generation afterward, the nations of the one world further divided. Nationalism and nationalist alliances would be rampant, the world "full of atomic bombs," and world government and world community no longer spoken of anywhere.

26
"We're Only Scientists"

Bernie Loomer was no ordinary dean, still less an ordinary dean of a divinity school. But the divinity school at Chicago was no ordinary divinity school. It was another Hutchins amalgam, composed of the several denominational schools that clustered around the university. It was, and was so called, the Federated Theological Faculty. And as each grizzled old professor of New or Old Testament or Church history retired, he was being replaced by, generally, a younger, friskier person. Bernie Loomer, a Hutchins appointee, just five years out of graduate school, was one of those young and frisky theologians and was subject, as he himself put it, to harebrained ideas.

He had one one day in the late summer of 1947, while most of his federated faculty were still away for the summer. Thirty-two years later he told about it in the University of Chicago Magazine ; in spite of the considerable number of persons ultimately involved in it, it had never been told about before. "Suppose, I theorized, that the University of Chicago had a monopoly or near monopoly of atomic scientists." He didn't know, he said, if this were the case. "And suppose, further, that these scientists were to form a solid community of mutual support dedicated to the purpose of making the most creative use of their unique position. And suppose, finally, that these scientists, with the help of many other members of the university, were to stipulate to the United States government certain conditions that must be realized if they were to continue in atomic research."^[1]

The world's case, in 1947, was critical, as Loomer saw it. Maybe nothing could be done to utilize atomic power for the benefit of humanity. But "for the first time in western history academicians held the balance of political power—if only for a time. . . . What if they were to exercise their

power in constructive or even revolutionary ways?" The harebrained dean didn't think he knew exactly what he was talking about or what he might propose. He thought he had a tiger by the tail—or vice versa. He called his predecessor as dean, Ernest "Pomp" Colwell. Colwell said, as a divine might properly say, "Good Lord" and, adding that such matters were beyond his depth, suggested that his youthful successor call the chancellor of the university. Loomer delayed—he did not want to hear Hutchins tell him he was ridiculous—"but I finally screwed up my courage and called him."

"Hutchins listened to my proposition without interruption. But when I had finished speaking there was no response at all. The silence continued for many seconds. . . . I asked him if he was still on the line. He finally said that he was. After another long pause he asked if I knew what he was doing. In response to my reply in the negative, he said: 'I'm kicking myself for not having thought of this idea myself.'" He said he had to go out of town and asked his caller to get in touch with some of the atomic scientists, especially Szilard.

Loomer was amazed at Hutchins' response: "His ready comprehension was not what amazed me. . . . But what really astonished me was his immediate willingness to explore the idea and to do so as the chief administrative officer of the University. . . . Even now I would have great difficulty in naming another person, comparably situated, who would have made such a reply or taken a similar action."^[2]

Pondering the proposition in the next few days, Dean Loomer decided that he should go to the faculty of the university, and only then to the scientists; the scheme, even in its inchoate form, was one which would immediately involve the university as a whole. By way of preparing the way to lay the matter before the faculty he sent his own faculty, the divinity school, the draft of a proposed memorandum to the chancellor. The memorandum suggested conditions—including the calling of a world constitutional convention by the United States—under which the atomic scientists would be willing to continue to work. "It was recognized, of course," said Loomer, "that the strength of the proposal derived from the strategic role of the atomic scientists of the university, and from their willingness both to cooperate with the scheme and to conduct a sit-down strike if the stipulated conditions (whatever they turned out to be) were not met."

Out of the conversations both without and within the divinity faculty, several problems emerged. First, the university was legally the board of trustees; would their approval have to be got? Second, could the university as such be expected, in violation of the American (but not of the European)

tradition, to take a political position? Third, could one department of a university (or the university as a whole) attempt in any way to interfere with the freedom of another department (or of its individual members) to conduct what research they wanted to? And fourth, on what grounds could a university make demands on a government anyway? On this last point Economics Professor Paul H. Douglas, a former pacifist turned Marine officer, Cold War proponent, and later U.S. Senator, buttonholed Loomer vehemently; when Loomer asked on what principles the proposition could be said to be unacceptable, Douglas replied, "Never mind the principles. A university just can't make demands on the government."^[3]

Loomer felt, then and thereafter, that Hutchins' willingness to explore the proposal in part reflected his distress at the ever wider gap between the sciences and the humanities—C. P. Snow's "two cultures." Loomer: "I believe that he viewed the proposal as a way of taking a concrete step in the direction of redeeming what had become a fairly bleak scene."

With the onset of the fall quarter, the divinity faculty met to consider the proposal, and after prolonged discussion the dean was authorized to draft a resolution to the chancellor. Seventeen members of the faculty eventually signed it; eleven, several of whom had specific rather than general objections, declined to. The resolution began with a series of whereases: the real possibility that further research in atomic energy could be used to create more destructive military weapons as well as to serve peaceful purposes; the moral ambiguity of the university in engaging in this kind of research; the preeminent position of the university in this field and its consequent strategic political role; the threat of atomic energy to civilization under the present political organization of national states; the inadequacy of the United Nations to control these destructive forces; and the resultant need for a world government. The resolution then asserted that the university could discharge its moral responsibility and continue its research in atomic energy only under conditions such as the three following, which should be presented to the United States government: (1) that the U.S. government immediately call a world constitutional convention for the purpose of establishing a world government; (2) that the Marshall Plan be extended to any nation which would attend the convention; (3) that upon the adoption of the world constitution the United States would surrender its knowledge of the atomic bomb to the world government.

The three conditions were presented to the chancellor as tentative or suggestive, and the theologians were well aware (as Loomer put it) of "the idealistic, utopian, and possibly flamboyant" qualities of the proposal. Had it been made public it would certainly have been dismissed by the

statesmen and bureaucrats as both naive and presumptuous, let alone idealistic, utopian, and flamboyant. But its signers did not choose to be more circumspect; the course of their discussion had made it clear that they felt that the world crisis was such as to demand radical measures of the sort they put forth.

The resolution was sent to Hutchins, who called two informal meetings of his deans to consider it. The divisions represented were divinity, physical science, biological science, social science, humanities, library, business, social service, law, and the Hutchins college. Hutchins, presiding, said almost nothing; every one of these men and women had been appointed by him in the course of his long administration. The tone of the meeting was uniformly negative, primarily on the ground that it was impermissible, and not just inappropriate, for a university or any other institution to make such demands and, in effect, by virtue of its strategic position, hold the country hostage to a proposition that envisaged a fundamental alteration of the fundamental law and organization of the national society. (There were not many asides, but one of the deans said that if the government rejected the conditions the scientists would lose their jobs because they had not been trained to do anything else.) There was no mistaking the deans' sentiment, and the resolution was obviously dead.

Then Hutchins, who hadn't spoken, rose and said, according to Loomer, "You don't understand, do you? You really don't understand. You will recall that when I first came here I suggested that the motto of the University should be Walt Whitman's 'Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World.' I now propose that the motto of the University should be, 'No Cross, No Crown.'" And he sat down, and the meeting, and with it the proposal, came to a quiet end.

But Loomer was able to add a postscript: "A short time later I met Will Munnecke, vice president of the University. He told me that, in view of the atomic energy proposal, I might be interested in the meeting he had just attended which involved Hutchins and David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The meeting was devoted to financial arrangements between the University and the Commission. Munnecke reported that after the business matters had been attended to, Lilienthal asked Hutchins to give him a few more minutes because he had another problem to discuss. Munnecke's account, again as closely as I can come to recapturing his words, went like this: Lilienthal said, 'I desperately need to talk to somebody. I preside over a commission that deals with the gatest physical power known to man. We make decisions that affect the whole planet. But we do not know what we are doing. . . . Do you know where I

can go for help?' Hutchins replied that he didn't. Then he added: 'You might try the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. They seem to be worrying about this more than some of the rest of us.'"^[4]

At the first of the two meetings called by Hutchins to discuss the Loomer resolution, one of the sorely troubled deans, balking, like the others, at making demands on the government, compared the proposal to "a threat by coal miners to let the country freeze to death by refusing to mine coal unless their demands are granted." Something over a year earlier that same parallel was introduced in a discussion in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was April of 1946, and the debate over transferring control of atomic energy from the military to a civilian commission was at its height. A journalist, who was nationally active on behalf of civilian control, had met two young physicists from the giant atomic bomb development plant at nearby Los Alamos. The physicists asked if he would advise them and some of their colleagues on what they might do to campaign for civilian control. It was arranged that four of the Los Alamos physicists would come down from the hill for a discussion.

The four scientists were all under forty, and they represented themselves as speaking for a clear majority of their colleagues. Many of them had written individual letters to their congressmen and senators, and a few to the White House, urging the passage of the embattled McMahon bill for civilian control. But they were distressed by most of the acknowledgments they'd got. The generals, riding high after winning the war, were determined to remain in the saddle, and appeared to be impervious to the civilian challenge.

When asked how many atomic physicists there were in the country, the four of them agreed upon an estimate of two thousand to twenty-five hundred.

"You've got the making of a nice little closed shop," observed the journalist. "You have a couple of thousand of highly intelligent men and women, probably a majority of them one way or another already in touch with each other. You've got a house organ, and a powerful one, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reaching, would you say, a majority again?" They nodded. "Then, you're all set. You organize as fast as you can and demand of Congress that control be taken from the military, and you tell Congress that if your demand isn't met you'll strike."

"Strike?" said one.

"Strike," said the journalist. "Your union will constitute a natural monopoly, and there's no way to wreck it."

"Union?" asked another.

"Union," said the journalist. "Just like the miners. John L. Lewis said,

'You can't mine coal with bayonets.' Or produce atomic energy. You're in better shape than the miners, even. There's no substitute for your know-how, and nobody outside the union has it."

There was a silence, and then one of the physicists who hadn't said anything spoke: "Wait a minute," he said. "We're only scientists."

Scott Buchanan had already written, after Hiroshima, that "the heaviest responsibility of the scientist may be to refuse to make himself useful," and when the German physicists, including von Weizsäcker, quit nuclear research, Hutchins spoke of "the professional ideal . . . adopted by many individual scientists who have declined to lend themselves to commercial or political plans of which they disapproved." In an off-the-cuff remark a few years later—a remark that was picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education —a plainer-spoken Hutchins looked back in anger and said, "On the whole, professors are worse than other people, and scientists are worse than other professors."

Antonio Borgese on hearing the Santa Fe story said, "When the Fascismo came to Italy, we said that the universities would be the last to surrender. They were the first."