He was hooked. For the next few years, climbing became an obsession. As soon as he completed one expedition he began planning the next. Nothing made Conant’s blood quicken like the mental and physical challenges of those arduous ascents. Making it to the top was not about who was fastest or strongest, it was about endurance—and staying power.
He had not seen a newspaper for the entire week he was away, and one glance at the front page made him wish he had remained with his head in the clouds. The international situation was deteriorating at an alarming pace. An undeclared war had broken out in Asia, with the Japanese raining shells down on Shanghai, China. Thousands of Americans were fleeing the fighting. Meanwhile, the war in Spain, which had started in July 1936, was being fought with great ferocity. The dictators in Germany and Italy were openly abetting the rebels’ attempt to overthrow the foundering Spanish Republic, supplying guns, tanks, and bombs. German Luftwaffe planes had been spotted in dogfights in the skies over Madrid. There was no telling where the Fascist expansion would end or what the map of Europe would look like when all was said and done.
Beneath his growing anxiety, Conant knew, was an older one: an anxiety about the extremism aroused by the last war. When he heard the strident debates about the Spanish Civil War—the overheated rhetoric, rigid sides formed, and political rebellion cast as a moral contest between good and evil—it took him right back to the emotionally charged scene into which he graduated in 1914. The parallels were unavoidable. Now, as Roosevelt’s attempts to preserve peace through “collective security” came to nothing, the threat of rearmament hung over all of Europe. Conant could see that it was a dress rehearsal for war. The key to keeping out of it, he believed, was to prevent the heightened emotions generated in America’s collective psyche “by the horror and dread of what we have seen in Europe” from once again consuming the country.
The more immediate problem was how to prevent Harvard from being riven by the “hatreds of the moment”—the rank partisanship and divided loyalties that had swamped Lowell’s watch. In an effort to avoid repeating the previous generation’s “passionate errors,” Conant tried to prepare students for the magnitude of the forces they would soon face. He lectured them constantly on the dangers of demagoguery: the angry crosscurrents of opinion, barrage of self-deluding propaganda, and “welter of words, slogans, and catch phrases” that would be hurled about with the irrational spitefulness of people at a time of war. “The acid test,” he once warned the class of 1938, “is whether you yourself indulge in them. If you call everyone who stands to the right of you a Bourbon and everyone who stands to the left a Communist, you are contributing your bit to the confusion.” Despite his low opinion of human nature, Conant hoped that educated minds might be proof against such pointless name-calling. Past or present, the problem of contending worlds could not be escaped. For all those caught in epochs like their own, when society was at odds, it was essential to have the intellectual discipline and character to be able to “chart an independent course” and, if necessary, “dare to be alone.”
Conant did not set out to sail against the powerful tide of American isolationism, but neither could he hide behind the pacifism he had invoked twenty years earlier. The Germany he had once known and loved had changed beyond all recognition. From the start, he had understood that Nazism meant “gangster rule,” and that the suppression of individual freedom and ruthless anti-Semitism would lead to “armed aggression.” On his last visit to Germany in the summer of 1930, just as the Nazi Party was beginning to attract widespread support, he had come face-to-face with the fanatic nationalism of the “man on the street.” He vividly recalled “not only bitterness in the air but a real spirit of revenge.” When he departed, he had known then that there would be no going back. He never expected to see Germany again.
Over the summer and fall of 1937, Hitler had seized the initiative in world affairs, and his lust for conquest was becoming obvious for all to see. As he ramped up his inflammatory speeches demanding that Germans in Czechoslovakia be reunited with their homeland, it seemed clear to Conant that Hitler was never going to be appeased or pacified. The Roosevelt administration, troubled by the violation of treaties and invasions of sovereign countries, appeared to reach the same conclusion. But in October, when Roosevelt suggested boldly that peace-loving nations join with Britain and France to “quarantine the aggressors,” Harvard’s cautious president was unwilling to go that far. While quick to denounce the spread of totalitarianism, he was not ready to take a stand on the issue that was just beginning to “boil to the surface”: namely, whether the United States should help the European democracies restrain Hitler.
“I was neither an isolationist nor an interventionist,” Conant recalled of his public stance in the late 1930s. Just as he eschewed any party affiliation, he preferred not to declare himself on a subject that was guaranteed to elicit strong objections from the alumni, who were overwhelmingly antiwar. To do so would invite controversy and risk being branded an extremist. Even if he was right about Hitler’s aggressive designs, it was not his place to be a prophet of doom. Conant’s strong sense of propriety—of not wanting to transgress the limits of acceptability—still ruled his decision making, and he reverted to what he thought of as his proper role as educator. He also had not forgotten Harvard’s rush to respond to the cry “make the world safe for democracy” in 1917, and bitterly reflected on the epitaphs that decision wrote. Though far from sanguine about the course of international affairs, he continued to temper his principled rhetoric, and to remain hopeful that a peaceful way of dealing with the dictator’s demands might yet be found.
Conant defended his position in a long, ruminative letter to his friend Archibald MacLeish, whose poem “Speech to the Scholars”—urging academics to join the proxy war being fought against Hitler and Mussolini in Spain—Conant publicly criticized as a premature call to arms. “I believe it is easy to lose the very things one wishes to preserve by declaring war in favor of them,” he told the zealous poet in the spring of 1937, noting that the last war to “end war and preserve democracy” would seem a case in point:
I do not believe, as you seem to think, that a scholar should see his freedom extinguished before he fights; but I do believe he should hold his fire until he sees the whites of his enemies’ eyes. And I am convinced above all that he should be on his guard against being drawn into a “preventive war.” I think a scholar should have his gun ready to draw when he is immediately attacked; but his gun should be carefully kept apart from his books all the rest of the time, else the smell of powder corrupts his scholarship. Above all, I believe he must keep himself free from entangling alliances and let the weary world fight around him. In short, I am not a “peace at any price” pacifist but a very suspicious Yankee trader whose policy is “armed neutrality.”
He was not surprised that Roosevelt’s trial balloon about joint action was immediately hooted down by the isolationists in Congress. Since burying his Republican opponent, Kansas governor Alfred M. Landon, in the 1936 election, the president had squandered much of the goodwill with his efforts to expand the Supreme Court to ensure a pro–New Deal majority. No doubt, Roosevelt knew his quarantine speech was considerably out front of where the nation stood and was simply testing the waters, but the loud criticism it received was a sign of the country’s profound reluctance to take any action. Disillusioned over the outcome of the “war to end war,” most Americans had come to believe it had been a mistake to intervene in the First World War. To many, appeasement seemed like a perfectly appropriate strategy in a part of the globe with a long history of squabbling over borders and jockeying for power. Anti-imperialist and antiwar sentiment swelled on college campuses, where students favored unqualified neutrality, with most opposed to sending aid of any kind for fear it would bring the struggle to American shores.
Conant had also seen how public opinion had been “poisoned” during the 1920s by North Dakota senator Gerald P. Nye’s investigation of the munition
s industry, and his committee’s insinuations that the British had colluded with greedy arms makers to engineer America’s entry into the war. The result was a deep distrust of imperial Britain, and a lingering suspicion that America had been duped into fighting. Isolationists such as Nye and William E. Borah, a senior senator known as the “Lion from Idaho,” continued to insist that the United States should stay aloof from the struggle. There was so much popular support for measures designed to keep America from being dragged into another war that Congress enacted neutrality legislation in 1935, 1936, and again in 1937. These acts not only forbade the loaning of funds to belligerents but also authorized a strict embargo on the sale of arms to all participants—aggressors and victims alike—in the event of war.
As the news from Europe continued to worsen, Conant became more apprehensive and pessimistic. After the Anschluss, Hitler’s breathtakingly efficient annexation of Austria in March 1938, there was little doubt that the Czech Sudetenland was next. Events in Europe had taken on a dangerous momentum. On August 27, the papers carried the news that the British government would back Czechoslovakia, and the chancellor of the exchequer, Sir John Simon, virtually announced that a German invasion would bring England into the war on the side of France. Returning to Cambridge to prepare for the start of another fall term, Conant was increasingly worried about the possibility of war and the proper course for the United States. But he was still reluctant to take sides in the struggle, writing Walter Lippmann, “I am beginning to think that any solution which does not involve a general European war would be highly satisfactory from my point of view.”
The Munich crisis, which unfolded over the month of September, left him disgusted with appeasement and the feebleness of democracies, including his own. He had hoped Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, would not give in to German pressure, but, eager to avoid a military confrontation at all cost, Chamberlain capitulated completely. In return for promising not to seek another foot of territory in Europe, Hitler got everything he desired without firing a single shot. German occupation of the Sudeten would begin October 1. Shocked by the diplomatic catastrophe, Conant judged Chamberlain’s action to be an almost “criminal error.” Britain and France had sacrificed their continental position to procure peace. There could be no future for Europe if no one stood up to brute force. It seemed to him that “the problem of evil was being rammed down our throats by every hourly bulletin from the diplomatic front.”
But if he was so convinced of the “cause of stopping Hitler,” why had he not spoken out? Did he have a moral obligation to do so? At the same time, “What right had a citizen of a nation that was deeply committed to isolation and neutrality to pass verdict on another country’s refusal to risk war?” Yet what was the alternative? “Could there still be an escape from the impending holocaust? And if so, on what terms? Could the claims of honor and justice be satisfied and war avoided?” Was there enough definitive evidence of Hitler’s will to expand to justify action? He agonized over the implications of his logic—and the inexorable conclusion. “Like many others,” he recalled, “I was tortured by such questions.”
After the infamous events of November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht—as the Nazis dubbed the looting and destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues that left German streets lined with miles of shattered glass—Conant joined other university presidents in denouncing the Reich’s assault on Jews. The new wave of violent state-sponsored pogroms shocked the world. There was no longer any pretending that Hitler would moderate his racial policies or permit the orderly emigration of those trying to escape persecution. The news of the terrible events stirred Conant to action, and he participated in a radio broadcast in which he condemned the “barbaric spirit of the German government.” Hitler’s coming to power “struck a note of fear” in him, “lest it should happen here.”
The suffering of so many young refugees shook Harvard students out of their apathy. On Friday, November 25, a small delegation of undergraduates, led by a senior named Robert E. Lane, called on Conant to ask for permission to hold a fund-raiser. They were seeking the university’s support for their plan to provide twenty scholarships for refugee students through a campaign aimed at raising $10,000 from their fellow students and another $25,000 from faculty. “We went to Conant’s office in a mood of nervous preparation for engagement,” recalled Lane, now a Yale professor emeritus. The president greeted them coolly, his face unreadable, but before they were done making their case, he surprised them by agreeing to match their efforts “dollar for dollar.”
Conant’s decision to back the students’ refugee initiative received nationwide publicity, as did his ringing endorsement of their cause as a symbol that “the humanitarian basis of democracy is not dead.” He did not stop there, but went on to urge that the movement be expanded across the country. A New York Times editorial praised Conant’s efforts on behalf of academic freedom. Supportive messages arrived from FDR and New York governor Herbert Lehman. Albert Einstein, who had refused to attend the tercentenary because of the presence of pro-Nazi German academics, sent a telegram: “APPRECIATE GREATLY YOUR GENEROUS EFFORT AS AID IN EMERGENCY AND AS HUMANITARIAN AID.”
Conant began to cast about for other ways to educate the public about the realities of the European situation and shared his unease with a small group of influential men of similar conviction. For the past year, he had chaired the blue-ribbon Committee on Scientific Aids to Learning, established by the National Research Council, to investigate how new technological advances could be adapted for use in the classroom and advanced research. The membership of the committee consisted of leading scientists turned administrators, including Vannevar Bush, the former vice president of MIT, who had recently become president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Karl Compton, president of MIT; Frank Jewett, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories; and Richard C. Tolman, a respected theoretical physicist and dean of Caltech’s graduate school. Whenever Conant gathered his colleagues on the committee, their attention turned from technological know-how to technological superiority, and to the question of whether the country should prepare to confront the German threat.
By the time he sat down in early 1939 to compose his autobiographical note for his class’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report, Conant was more convinced than ever of Hitler’s goal to dominate Europe, and he now believed the United States could not allow him to go unchecked. Hitler’s ambitions knew no bounds. The dictator had shown repeatedly that he had no respect for the legitimate claims of other countries, no use for compromise, no interest in peace. “With Munich fresh in our minds, and a February crisis apparently brewing as I write,” Conant reflected, “it is hard to turn one’s thoughts back to the summer of 1914 without having the question arise, must it all happen again? Have the last twenty years been nothing but a fruitless armistice?”
* * *
He was in Randolph, New Hampshire, on September 1, enjoying the last leisurely days of his summer holiday, when he heard the radio report that Hitler’s panzer divisions had invaded Poland. The news came as a stunning blow. England and France, as allies of the overrun nation, would have no choice but to declare war on Germany. On August 23 Germany and Russia had signed a nonaggression pact, making sure the march into neighboring Poland would go unopposed.
Conant’s first call was to Karl Compton, who had just been appointed to the newly established War Resources Board to advise the army and the navy on the nation’s preparedness plans: Could American scientists volunteer to aid the Allied countries in their scientific war work? “No,” Compton told him; such assistance would violate the Neutrality Act. It was a crime for any individual American citizen to assist the war effort of another nation. With the country strongly isolationist, nothing could be done. But Conant had lost faith in neutrality. Noninvolvement was no longer an option. His instincts told him it was time for action.
Having thrown off his uncertainty and ambivalence, he was frustrated by the American public’s
reaction to the war. “[It] seems to me,” he complained in a letter to Archibald MacLeish, “most ostrich-like, puerile, and pusillanimous. But being the head of an institution with 8,000 men under my direction who may get shot if we go to war, while I shan’t, I am a bit estopped from saying much. I don’t like the moral dilemma I find myself in,” he added, “but my personal emotions are a small matter in these times of world grief.” It was much the same dilemma he had faced in the early days of his presidency, and the disparity between his public obligations and private inclination again made it difficult to step forward. A few days later, MacLeish came to dinner and spent the night, and they shared their mutual disgust of academe’s dispassionate remove, their earlier feud over MacLeish’s poetic call to arms forgotten.
A week after the German invasion, Roosevelt declared a limited national emergency. On September 13 he ordered Congress to convene a special session to revise the Neutrality Act. The neutrality legislation passed during the past few years was too inflexible. By prohibiting the shipment of arms and munitions to all combatants, it particularly hurt the Allies, which were far less equipped to wage war. However, the bill permitted the president to make exceptions at his own discretion if the goods were paid for in advance and if they left America in foreign vessels, known as the “cash and carry” exemption. Roosevelt’s proposal to revise the law authorizing him to determine who were the aggressors and victims in a war, and to withhold or supply aid accordingly—in effect enabling the United States to sell arms to Britain and France if they carried them in their own ships—immediately provoked a fierce national debate.
Determined to block FDR’s action, the isolationists launched a massive publicity campaign. The night after Roosevelt’s announcement, Senator Borah took to the airwaves to point out the risks of such a move and inveigh against the revision or repeal of the neutrality legislation. The following night, Colonel Charles Lindbergh, the reclusive aviator, resigned from his position with the Army Air Corps in order to publicly oppose FDR. Speaking on all three national radio networks, the revered hero from the 1920s made an eloquent case that the United States not involve itself in Europe’s eternal feuding. Germany, he averred, was no threat to their democratic society, was moreover entitled to rectify the Versailles injustices, and sending munitions to the allies could never ensure victory but would cost in lives “the best of American youth.”
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