By the fall of 1948, the institute was offering computing services with the Card-Programmed Calculator to both academic researchers and commercial firms in California, including aircraft manufacturers and oil companies. Within six months, Albert Cahn could report that “calls upon this service are such that the facility has been expanded to almost double the size contemplated when the institute was established.”18 Originally, the new calculating machine was overseen by one of Blanch’s computers, a woman named Roselyn Seidel, but with the increased demands, the leaders of the National Bureau of Standards wanted the device to be managed by someone experienced with punched card machines.19 After brief negotiations, John Curtiss convinced Everett Yowell to leave Columbia University and join the Institute for Numerical Analysis. The mathematical staff considered Yowell a “significant appointment” to the institute, but Yowell recalled that the human computers were less enthusiastic. “Ros [Seidel] was not happy to have me hired over her.”20
The Card-Programmed Calculator was not a full electronic computer, though it was a considerable improvement over the old punched card tabulators. Using special punched cards and an IBM plugboard, an operator could instruct the machine to undertake a complicated series of operations. It also had an electronic memory that could store forty-eight numbers of ten digits each.21 With this memory, the machine could handle small simultaneous equation problems, such as the least squares calculations that had stymied George Snedecor at Iowa State University twenty years before. However, the new machine could not handle large problems, including the one that had appeared in the Mathematical Tables Project test of linear programming.
Some simultaneous equation calculations posed unusual problems for Blanch’s computers. On these calculations, the computers could follow every step of the computing plan, check the work with a desk calculator to ensure than every step was done properly, and still produce values that were wildly incorrect. Though some blamed the computing plan, Blanch discovered a difficulty that would eventually be called “ill conditioning.” Ill-conditioned simultaneous equation problems are fundamentally unstable, just as a coin balanced on its edge is unstable. Rounding the values of an ill-conditioned problem, a simple and innocuous act, can cause the calculation to collapse into a meaningless mess of figures. The only way to fix this problem is to reorganize the computing plan, producing a plan that is algebraically equivalent to the original calculation but avoids certain combinations of the four arithmetic operations.22
During the construction of the new machine, the mathematicians at the institute started exploring computing techniques that were difficult to do by hand. They experimented with linear programming and invited John von Neumann to visit the institute. Another mathematician developed “relaxation techniques,” computing methods that began with a rough guess of the final answer and then slowly adjusted that guess. Many at the institute became interested in “Monte Carlo” techniques, methods that used random numbers to calculate answers.23 The institute computers worked on such calculations as best they could, though they could rarely handle a large problem. The staff never developed the kind of computing skill that was found at the Mathematical Tables Project, as few computers stayed at the institute for more than a year. The rapid departure of human computers never seemed to bother the mathematicians, as they were looking ahead to the new computing machine.24
The electronic computer took three years to complete and went through three changes of name. Employees at the institute called the machine “Zephyr,” after the great western wind, while the staff of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington referred to it as “Sirocco,” the hot air from the desert. Eventually, the two groups settled on the government acronym SWAC, which stood for Standards Western Automatic Computer.25 Though the members of the institute occasionally felt isolated from the academic centers of the East Coast, they generally had no regrets about their distance from Washington. John Todd wrote that a “certain distance from Washington was certainly desirable, for some mathematicians are uncomfortable with strict dress code and regular hours.”26 Their location may have spared them the need to arrive at work at 8:00 in the morning or to wear formal business clothing, but it did not insulate them from the political turmoil of the late 1940s.
The political conflict of this era was rooted in the looming problems of the Cold War, the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, and the frustrations of the Republican Party. The Cold War placed the United States in a contest for global dominance with a frightening and powerful enemy. Roosevelt had reordered the political landscape in a way that kept the Democratic Party in power for over sixteen years. The Republicans, frustrated by the Democratic hold on power, were “traumatized and bitterly divided,” observed the journalist David Halberstam.27 The Republicans had always been a minority party and had held power only by pulling support away from the Democrats. During the period of Republican dominance in the nineteenth century, conservative leaders had often found it useful to discredit Democratic opponents by calling them secessionists, politicians sympathetic to the old Confederate states. Seventy-five years later, a new generation of Republican leaders accused the Democrats of being communists, agents of the Bolshevik revolution, traitors. The fact that some of the Democrats had actually been communists, or at least had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union, bolstered such charges. By the fall of 1949, Republicans equated communism with treason and pointed to the Soviet atomic bomb program for their proof. The Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear weapon on August 29, 1949, an event that surprised American weapons experts.28 Only a few weeks before, the Central Intelligence Agency had predicted “that [a Soviet] atomic bomb cannot be completed before mid-1951.”29
The center of the American political maelstrom was the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee, often called HUAC. It was filled with disaffected Republicans who were either valiantly defending the United States from an insidious enemy or trying to make a name for themselves by pinning the label of communism on public figures, depending upon one’s point of view. The committee investigated the senior members of the Truman administration, the writers, directors, and actors of Hollywood, and the scientists in government service. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee had begun an investigation of Edward Condon, the director of the Bureau of Standards, an investigation that struck uncomfortably close to the Institute for Numerical Analysis.
Condon had liberal inclinations, though he had never been a member of the Communist Party, and he had worked on the atomic bomb during the war. He spent most of the war at the University of California, but he had briefly served at the Los Alamos laboratory. At Los Alamos, he been engaged in “several arguments about security regulations,” according to historian Jessica Wang, and soon resigned his position. In his resignation, he stated his belief that military control of scientific information was impeding work on the bomb. “To his mind, intellectual freedom and international cooperation were intimately linked,” wrote Wang. “Scientific progess required open communications, free from military requirements of secrecy.”30 When the House Un-American Activities Committee learned of Condon’s record at Los Alamos and his support for the open dissemination of atomic research, the committee reviewed his case and declared that Condon was “one of the weakest links in our atomic security.”31
In general, the House of Representatives investigated only public figures and senior members of the administration, such as Condon. Junior employees, such as those who worked for the Institute for Numerical Analysis, were investigated by administrative committees that had been established by the Truman administration as a way of deflecting Republican criticism. The committee that oversaw the National Bureau of Standards and the Institute for Numerical Analysis was Department of Commerce Loyalty Board Number Two. In December, this board announced that it would require “pre-appointment loyalty checks of all research associates and guest workers who are located at National Bureau of Standards for more than one week.”32 This order included everyone workin
g at the Institute for Numerical Analysis, the administrative staff, the eight permanent researchers, and the twenty annual visitors.
The first member of the Institute for Numerical Analysis to be called before Department of Commerce Loyalty Board Number Two was the senior administrator, Albert Cahn. No record has been found of Cahn’s case, and all we can do is speculate that Cahn belonged to the broad class of liberal scientists, a group that worried many loyalty investigators. One of the few concrete facts we know of Cahn is that he signed the July 17 Petition, a document drafted by Manhattan Project scientists after the first test of the plutonium bomb. The petition requested that President Truman delay the use of the new weapon.33 Manhattan Project officials annotated one copy of the petition, indicating whether each signatory was important or unimportant to the project.34 While this act may have brought Cahn to the Loyalty Board, it may also have been only one of several pieces of evidence against him. In all, seventy scientists signed the petition, and some of them were never questioned by an investigative panel.35
After Cahn was summoned before the Loyalty Board, fourteen months passed before his case was decided. The delay did not bode well for him. During this period, Klaus Fuchs confessed to passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union; Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury; Mao Tse-tung and his followers established the People’s Republic of China; Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a rambling but inflammatory speech in which he claimed to have evidence of communists in the State Department; North Korean troops invaded South Korea; and, finally, the FBI arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of spying for the Soviets. When the Loyalty Board finally reviewed Cahn’s case, they concluded that the evidence against Cahn seemed to fit into a broader pattern of threats against the United States. They judged that the institute administrator was a security risk and placed him on administrative leave.36
Following Albert Cahn came Gertrude Blanch. Blanch was especially vulnerable, as she had already failed not one but two security investigations. The first investigation had been conducted in 1942, when the Mathematical Tables Project was certified as an essential relief project. That review had denied her a security clearance. The second investigation had occurred in 1946, when Blanch had been invited to join the computing staff at Los Alamos. In that review, the FBI quickly uncovered the results of the 1942 investigation and declared Blanch untrustworthy. When the administrators of Los Alamos received this verdict, they quietly withdrew their invitation.37 Both of these judgments were part of the record presented to Department of Commerce Loyalty Board Number Two in the spring of 1951. When the board considered her case, they concurred with the earlier decisions and judged her untrustworthy, but before she could be placed on administrative leave, Blanch appealed the ruling and requested a formal hearing before the board. The board accepted her request and scheduled her hearing for May 1952.38
“There are only a few times,” wrote the 1950s sociologist William Whyte, when an individual “can wrench his destiny into his own hands—and if he does not fight then, he will make a surrender that will later mock him.”39 By nature, Gertrude Blanch avoided public confrontations. Her moments of strength were private moments. She had quietly postponed a college education in order to support her mother. She had gently guided the poverty-stricken computers of the Mathematical Tables Project. On at least one occasion, she had stood firm against the bluster of Arnold Lowan. In this last situation, Blanch had to confront the charges against her or surrender her place as a scientist. The case against her was based on the five points that had been identified in 1942. The first three were circumstantial. First, the FBI had an informant who claimed to have seen her purchase a copy of the Daily Worker sometime during the late 1930s. Next, at approximately the same time, the New York office of the WPA identified her as a “Red.” Finally, she had shared an apartment with her sister and brother-in-law, who were open members of the Communist Party. The last two points were harder to dismiss. During the 1930s, Blanch had registered as a member of the Democratic Labor Party, an organization that the FBI claimed was “captured by the Communists.” She had also signed petitions for political candidates who openly identified themselves as communists.40
Blanch approached her loyalty hearing with the same logical care that she brought to her computing plans. She knew that she was a minor figure in the drama and would gain nothing from grand statements or denunciations. She could not behave as the author Lillian Hellman had behaved in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and declaim, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”41 Her best strategy lay in arguing that the charges were false, in showing that she was a valuable government scientist, and in suggesting that there was nothing to gain from dismissing her. She gathered letters of support from her fellow scientists, asking those who knew her personally to attest to her loyalty and her value to the government. She also drafted and redrafted her statement for the board, refining the logic, honing the evidence, creating the kind of defense that only a mathematician could make.
“Let us assume, for a moment,” Blanch began, “that both my sister and my brother-in-law could be called somewhat radically inclined. It does not follow that I, too, must share their views—in fact, the probability is not even high that there is a correlation between their views and mine.” It was not an easy task to dispose of a communist who shared the same parents and who had once shared the same house. By starting with this issue, Blanch risked losing credibility with the board, but if she could make her case, then the rest would be easy to handle. She spent a few minutes discussing her relationship with her sister, commenting on how sisters could be close but have different political opinions, and then moved to the subject of communist periodicals. “I personally do not read the Daily Worker,” she remarked; “the newspaper does not happen to be to my taste, nor does it reflect my political sympathies.” She ignored the issue of her voting registration and would not deny that she had signed petitions, though she admitted only to signing papers that called for the “admittance of Jews to Palestine.” She concluded her presentation by stating, “I think I may say that I am conservative in my tastes, and I have never leaned toward radical movements of any sort.”42
Blanch understood herself well enough to know that she was not a revolutionary and that she preferred to work within existing social structures, even at times like these. If she were a communist, then she was the sort of communist that had been educated at the czar’s expense, a communist who liked nothing better than Western art, music, and theater, a communist who deeply desired to purchase a home of her own. Her most radical idea was the notion that women could be mathematicians, that they could work outside the family, that they could have a role in public affairs. Her presentation was bolstered by interviews with neighbors and coworkers. A few suggested that she might have liberal inclinations, but none questioned her commitment to the United States. When the board passed judgment on her case, they declared that they had “no objection on grounds of Loyalty” to her continued employment at the institute.43 The hearing resolved the charges against Blanch and allowed her to return to her job, but it did not end the threats to the National Bureau of Standards and the Institute for Numerical Analysis.
The Bureau of Standards was attacked in the winter of 1953, after Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as president and returned the Republican Party to power. The new cabinet member responsible for the National Bureau of Standards, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, was highly critical of government workers. He frequently spoke of removing employees who were trying to “hamper, hoodwink and wreck the new administration.” He complained about “the theories of foreign socialists” and “the notions of local egg-heads” and finally promised that he was “going to improve the situation by finding means to replace [disloyal employees].”44
In the first weeks of his administration, John Curtiss came within Weeks’s sights. Curtiss was an unconventional man, a “bachelor who enjoyed fast cars and plenty of good food and
drink,” according to his friend John Todd.45 He was known to hold large and boisterous parties in his small apartment. “He invited hundreds (it seemed) of guests,” reported one member of the institute staff, “and one was very lucky if you managed to get inside.”46 Behind the flamboyant lifestyle was the suggestion, uncomfortable to the age, that John Curtiss might be a homosexual. Government agencies generally considered such individuals vulnerable to blackmail and hence poor security risks.47 In early March, Curtiss was informed that he had been identified as a likely homosexual and that he must choose between a public dismissal and a quiet resignation. His colleagues encouraged him to appeal the ruling. After considering his situation, Curtiss decided to leave quietly. “I have a great desire not to be a cause celebre,” he wrote, and added that he desired to have “a scientific career which will be a little more constructive than that of a professional victim.”48
A month after Curtiss left, Secretary Weeks turned on the director of the National Bureau of Standards, a physicist named Allen Astin. Astin had replaced the embattled Edward Condon, who had resigned during his investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Condon “cited his low government salary as his reason for leaving,” observed one historian of Condon’s career, “but more likely the continual burden of having to respond to [the House Un-American Activities Committee] accusations had grown to outweigh the appeal of public service.”49
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