Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America

by Peter J. Kuznick

Overview

The debate over scientists' social responsibility is a topic of great controversy today. Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to the 1930s and places it in a context that forces a reevaluation of the relationship between science and politics in twentieth-century America. Kuznick reveals how an influential segment of the American scientific community during the Depression era underwent a profound transformation in its social values and political beliefs, replacing a once-pervasive conservatism and antipathy to political involvement with a new ethic of social reform.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226685427
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	374
File size:	531 KB

About the Author

Peter J. Kuznick is professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

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CHAPTER 1

Science on the Defensive in Depression America

The 1920s: Scientificus Americanus as Organic Product

Although the 1920s has gained notoriety more for the gin that flowed in bathtubs than for the chemicals that flowed in laboratories, it was the scientists' alteration of molecular structure, rather than the bootleggers' alteration of states of consciousness, that has proved to be the decade's enduring legacy to American civilization. The 1920s witnessed a great quantitative expansion of science. The pace of fundamental theoretical advances might not have been as rapid as either the 1895–1905 period or the early 1930s, but the institutionalization of science as a permanent part of American culture proceeded at an unprecedented rate.

Science had contributed mightily to the war effort, a contribution that was widely recognized throughout American society. As a result, many scientists were bullish about its prospects for the 1920s. Physicist Robert A. Millikan, American science's most prominent spokesman during the postwar decade, communicated this optimism to an audience at the University of Chicago, exulting that "for the first time in history the world has been waked up by the war to an appreciation of what science can do." Translating this acknowledged scientific potential into social reality did not occur overnight. Anthropologist Robert Lowie expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of American science in his contribution to the 1922 assessment of American society, Civilization in the United States. "American science," Lowie wrote, "notwithstanding its notable achievements, is not an organic product of our soil; it is an epiphenomenon, a hothouse growth. It is still the prerogative of a caste, not a treasure in which the nation glories." Lowie objected to both the inadequate funding of research and the poor treatment characteristically accorded scientists in this country.

As the decade progressed, however, science not only succeeded in becoming that "treasure in which the nation glories" but, even more important to most Americans, helped produce the treasure, measured in increased consumer goods and higher standards of living, in which the nation really gloried. Science's new prestige accrued largely from this close identification in the public mind with the prosperity of the 1920s, an identification scientists took pains to cultivate. In much the same vein, profit-minded industrialists, eager to capture a larger share of this rapidly expanding consumerism, increasingly viewed scientific and technological innovation as the competitive edge in their machinations. As a result, science gained new patrons. Industrial research laboratories mushroomed from some 300 in 1920, to 1,000 in 1927, to more than 1,400 in 1930. Chemists especially benefited from this expansion, finding themselves in particularly great demand. In 1921, one of every three industrial researchers was a chemist, that percentage dropping to one in four by the end of the decade. From 1920 through mid-decade, roughly 70 percent of all chemists worked in industry.

Corporate largesse toward applied research did not extend in nearly the same degree to basic research, which could not promise so quick a return on the corporate investment dollar. In his address to the 1926 year-end meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover expressed concern over the enormous disparity between applied and pure research in the United States, the former receiving some $200 million per year and involving more than 30,000 people, the latter less than $10 million for 4,000 researchers. With basic research largely segregated at the universities, the burgeoning of American higher education made up some of the shortfall. Between 1920 and 1930, the number of doctorates earned in the sciences approximately tripled.

Substantially increased grant programs of the Rockefeller Foundation, the General Education Board, and the Carnegie Corporation helped underwrite the expansion of university science. In 1919, the Rockefeller Foundation began supporting research by individual scientists with a $500,000 grant to the National Research Council. In 1923, the General Education Board, again with Rockefeller money, switched from its long-standing policy of contributing to the general endowments of universities to one of providing multimillion-dollar grants to subsidize research by particular university science departments. Despite welcoming the infusion of additional research funds, some scientists shared the initial public mistrust of the foundations. Columbia psychologist James McKeen Cattell, whose editorship of Science, the Scientific Monthly, and School and Society guaranteed him a ready platform, repeatedly condemned Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundation attempts "to dictate educational affairs all over the country. ... So many institutions are now subsidized by one or both of these foundations," Cattell warned in 1917, "that many educational leaders are not free to express their real opinions or are not in a position to form unprejudiced opinions." MIT mathematician Edwin B. Wilson responded to a Cattell article attacking the Carnegie Foundation with an ambivalence more characteristic of the scientists' initial attitudes. "Sometimes I think it would be well to go in with them," Wilson wrote to Cattell, "and sometimes I feel that there is no use of putting good money after bad in the hands of dishonest people." Wilson harbored strong suspicions toward the president of the Carnegie Foundation, whom he considered "morally dishonest." During the 1920s, however, public suspicion of the foundations generally subsided as foundations allayed fears by bringing in responsible administrators and supporting seemingly benign or innocuous research.

Thus fortified, academia remained the primary locus of scientific research during the interwar years, despite the phenomenal growth of industrial research. Considerable variation existed, however, among disciplines. Approximately three-quarters of newly trained physicists, for example, remained at universities, concentrated largely at the top twenty schools, which granted 91.4 percent of all Ph.D.'s between 1920 and 1929. Despite the high visibility of lab-coated industrial scientists in product advertisements, the public overwhelmingly associated the glamour, prestige, and excitement of science with the academic scientists. With rare exceptions, the nation's recognized scientific leaders came from academia throughout the interwar period.

Largely attributing American science's rapid advance to its close ties with industry and finance, the nation's established scientific leaders, men like Millikan, George Ellery Hale, Arthur Noyes, Frank Jewett, J. J. Carty, and Gano Dunn, became increasingly committed, for both philosophical and pragmatic reasons, to strict reliance on the private sector for support. They and their allies skillfully exploited their leadership positions in science's inner sanctum, the National Research Council (NRC), to forge close ties with the world of corporate power, financial institutions, private philanthropies, and academia. Established initially in 1916 as an arm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) charged with advising the government in the case of war, the NRC continued to play a critical role in shaping the development of science throughout the interwar period. During wartime and postwar debates over funding of science, the NRC leadership group, spurred by Hale and Millikan, consistently lobbied for private philanthropy and corporate backing rather than government support.

In 1926, leaders of the scientific community launched an ambitious campaign to raise a National Research Endowment to fund pure research. Chaired by Hoover, the endowment strove to raise $20 million from corporate and foundation sources by convincing the business community that continued industrial progress depended on advances in pure science. The effort dragged on for several years before the disappointed scientists realized that few businessmen shared their vision of science and progress and that most of those who did insisted on a more direct, and exclusive, return from their investment. Still, within the scientific establishment, few joined Cattell in questioning this reliance on business and philanthropy, a policy that Cattell decried as aristocratic and undemocratic.

Besides the difficulty in obtaining adequate backing for pure research, science's dependence on corporate and philanthropic sources of support also had other drawbacks, encouraging both an allegiance to the status quo and a suffusion of science with business values. Undeniably, leading scientists received many tangible benefits from their relationship with business. The New Republic described the scientists' newly elevated status: "Today [the scientist] sits in the seats of the mighty. He is the president of the great universities, the chairman of semi-official governmental councils, the trusted adviser of states and even corporations."

Many found ways to take advantage of science's newfound prestige. Gano Dunn, president of J. G. White Engineering Corporation, complained to an audience of Columbia alumni that science had been banalized by overuse. "Science has worked so many miracles and stands so high in popular esteem that her name is borrowed to dress up all sorts of causes that want to make a favorable impression," Dunn regretted, adding, "In consequence of this there is confusion as to the meaning of the term. We even hear of the science of pugilism." Similarly, the Nation objected to the British Association for the Advancement of Science misusing science's enormous influence by putting scientific expertise behind the doctrine of the immortality of the soul at its 1928 annual meeting in Glasgow. The magazine's editors warned that with science so venerated, its spokesmen having achieved an authority comparable to the medieval priesthood, scientists must be more circumspect in their public pronouncements: "A sentence which begins with 'Science says' will generally be found to settle any argument in a social gathering or sell any article from tooth-paste to refrigerator."

Astute advertisers mercilessly exploited the scientists' image as authority figures. Even the advertisers' own journal, Printer's Ink, soon begged for relief, suggesting a "Forget Scientists Week": "Perhaps you have been so foolish as to think that scientists work at the business of science. Not so. They test cigarettes, tell frightened mothers about breakfast food, warn young men against the dangers of something that usually ends with -osis." On occasion, the journal conceded sarcastically, though modern scientists had become little more than "scientists of the advertising pages," they might still achieve an "epoch-making discovery" that promised to revolutionize the manufacture of galoshes.

As it turned out, neither the advertising industry nor the public at large was ready to forget the scientists. The public hungered for news about science. To help meet this need, Science Service was formed in 1920 with the express purpose of expanding and upgrading the coverage of science news in the nation's press. A recent study of articles on science in eleven popular magazines between 1910 and 1955 found that the number of articles on science peaked in 1926. In that same year, Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith received a Pulitzer Prize while Paul de Kruif, the young bacteriologist who assisted Lewis in writing his prize-winning novel, watched his book Microbe Hunters swiftly scale the nonfiction bestseller lists. The decade's most energetic popularizer of science was Science Service editor Edwin E. Slosson, whose 1919 book Creative Chemistry sold more than 200,000 copies by the end of the 1920s. During these years, Albert Einstein became science's first bona fide celebrity. Although the Einstein hairdo never caught on among fashion-conscious Americans, his face was as widely recognized as his relativity theory was misunderstood.

As a source of values and beliefs, science contributed to undermining the role of religion, but then helped fill the resulting void. Harvard geologist Kirtley Mather did not despair because science had destroyed belief in a God unbound by natural law and in religion positing mankind's salvation by "some extraterrestrial force aided only by the prayers of the elect." In its place, Mather believed, science could help create a new religion "based on facts and experiences, a religion developed by rigidly scientific methods of thought." Perhaps, he suggested, "true Christianity is just that sort of religion." Appreciating the irony in the situation, the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick admitted, "When a prominent scientist comes out strongly for religion, all the churches thank Heaven and take courage as though it were the highest possible compliment to God to have Eddington believe in Him. ... Science has become the arbiter of this generation's thought, until to call even a prophet and a seer scientific is to cap the climax of praise."

Perhaps the symbolic capstone to the 1920s, referred to as "the golden age of scientific faith," a decade that witnessed the firm integration of science into the dominant culture, came with the 1928 election of "the Great Engineer," Herbert Hoover. Hoover received the active support of Millikan, Hale, Karl Compton, and other prominent scientists during the campaign, in appreciation of his having thrown his weight foursquare behind efforts to establish a National Research Endowment to increase the private-sector funding for pure research. Hoover's public image as a man of science exceeded that of any president since Jefferson.

Many have noted the importance of science to 1920s America, but none captured the spirit better than Frederick Lewis Allen.

The prestige of science was colossal. The man in the street and the woman in the kitchen, confronted on every hand with the new machines and devices which they owed to the laboratory, were ready to believe that science could accomplish almost anything; and they were being deluged with scientific information and theory. The newspapers were giving columns of space to inform (or misinform) them of the latest discoveries: a new dictum from Albert Einstein was now front-page stuff even though practically nobody could understand it. Outlines of knowledge poured from the presses to tell people about the planetesimal hypothesis and the constitution of the atom, to describe for them in unwarranted detail the daily life of the cave-man, and to acquaint them with electrons, endocrines, hormones, vitamin, reflexes, and psychoses. ...

The word science had become a shibboleth. To preface a statement with "Science teaches us" was enough to silence argument. If a sales manager wanted to put over a scheme or a clergyman to recommend a charity, they both hastened to say that it was scientific.

American Response to the Moratorium Proposal

Although ostensibly a victory for the forces of reaction, the 1925 Scopes trial is better understood as the final chapter of the sixty-year struggle by the King Canutes of religious fundamentalism to hold back the surging tide of science and modern thought. While these religious foes of science would never again pose so serious a challenge, it was a man of the cloth, Rev. Edward Arthur Burroughs, the bishop of Ripon, who started the antiscience kettle boiling again. Burroughs suggested that "every physical and chemical laboratory" be closed down, "and the patient and resourceful energy displayed in them transferred to recovering the lost art of getting together and finding a formula for making the ends meet in the scale of human life." His proposal received little support in England, and even less on this side of the Atlantic, being dismissed out of hand by most early commentators. The New York Times simply rejected the moratorium concept as "unthinkable." In fact, so few prominent Americans stepped forth to do battle on this issue, that the American press initially relied largely on commentary by British experts.

This is not to suggest that the attack on science had no American adherents in the late 1920s, just that most Americans were striving too furiously to attain the fruits of scientific endeavor to pay much heed. Sniping against science and technology had persisted unabated since the First World War, a war in which the scientists, led by the chemists, had participated willingly, often lending their talents to developing and improving weapons that contributed significantly to the carnage. In his 1926 book Ouroboros, or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind, Garet Garrett expressed the commonly held belief that "What made that war so terrifying was the power of the machine — an inconceivable power." In much the same vein, the preponderance of 1920s criticism focused not on science directly but on the machine and its impact on American culture — in terms of aesthetics, mass production, and consumerism. Pockets of resistance to science coalesced around the Southern Agrarians and Irving Babbitt–Paul Elmer More New Humanists, but the appeal of these movements proved limited. Even the frightening specter of the potential military application of scientific findings seemed unreal to a nation for which the prospect of another war appeared beguilingly remote.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Beyond the Laboratory"
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Copyright © 1987 The University of Chicago.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Science on the Defensive in Depression America
2. From Apathy to Engagement: Shifts in the Scientific World
3. The AAAS Shapes the Emerging Science and Society Movement
4. The Soviet Model: An Alternative Vision of Science and Society
5. The Soviet Influence on Physicians and Physiologists
6. Franz Boas Mobilizes the Scientists against Fascism
7. Scientists Establish the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom
8. Beyond Liberal Reform: The American Association of Scientific Workers
9. Conclusion
Manuscript Collections
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

A reprint of the 1987 original (cloth) edition. Kuznick (history, American U.) thoughtfully surveys scientists social and political attitudes and activities. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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