Force of Nature- The Life of Linus Pauling

by Thomas Hager

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  It was the last award he would receive from the federal government for a quarter century. Truman's federal loyalty program was being supplemented by state-enacted loyalty oaths that extended the reach from federal employees to hundreds of thousands of state and municipal workers. The hunt was on not for spies and Communists alone but for citizens who criticized America's foreign or domestic policies. Any statement against U.S. policy, especially from the left, was cause for suspicion. Evidence of criminal subversion was pushed aside in favor of attacking those who merely associated with the wrong groups. Dean Acheson, who endured a maelstrom of anti-Communist rhetoric during his confirmation hearings for secretary of state in early 1949, called it "the attack of the primitives." The pressure had its effect. It was becoming too dangerous to be a critic or a spokesperson for liberal causes. People stopped making their opinions known publicly. But not Pauling.

  Even as it became dangerous to associate with any vaguely left wing group in 1949, he was writing, "[Individuals, such as myself, must learn to get along with Communists. ... I know extremely few people who are recognized as Communists; but I do belong to a number of organizations that have been described as Communist-front organizations, and I have been interested to see how well the members of these organizations find it possible to get along with one another. ... I have been encouraged by my own experiences, to the extent that they do represent collaboration between Communists and non-Communists, to believe that the peoples of the world will ultimately find it possible to get along together, through the formation of an effective world government."

  As the ranks of America's liberal-left political action groups continued to thin, Pauling's national stature and visibility grew. He became a champion for what remained of the Left, a respected scientist who was unafraid to speak out, sign petitions, and sponsor meetings. Increasingly, any group looking for a public name to support a liberal cause came to Pauling. Despite his atheistic tendencies, he was asked and agreed to help welcome the "Red Dean of Canterbury"—as the press had dubbed Britain's Communist party member the Right Reverend Hewlett Johnson—to the United States in the face of a right-wing protest aimed at barring his entry. Pauling received extensive newspaper coverage for his daring act of shaking Johnson's hand (but he was disappointed to find the Red Dean little more than a "stuffy old ecclesiastic"). Pauling sponsored a national conference to discuss the erosion of civil liberties and another against deportation hysteria. He donated money to the Alger Hiss defense fund. He spoke out against the persecution of eleven leaders of the U.S. Communist party on trial in New York, exhorting a crowd in Los Angeles to "fight the witch hunt and the Communist scare."

  The loyalty program and its effects were especially galling. In the spring of 1949, Pauling took on the president of his alma mater, now called Oregon State College (OSC), over a loyalty case involving one of Pauling's former students, Ralph Spitzer. Spitzer had been teaching chemistry at OSC on a year-to-year contract when the college's president, A. L. Strand, fired him, using as an excuse a letter Spitzer had written to a science journal in which he argued that researchers should read and analyze the original work of the controversial Russian geneticist T. D. Lysenko before attacking his work. Spitzer, believing the real reason for his firing was that the president did not like his support of Wallace and promotion of the Progressive cause among students, fought the dismissal, causing a small storm of controversy. Strand refused to reconsider, noting Spitzer's "devotion to the party line" and the "Soviet propaganda which he and his wife have promoted on the campus." Local papers supported the president, noting that "infiltration by Reds and fellow travelers in college faculties to influence the youth merits a purge of the termites." The case earned national headlines when Henry Wallace added his voice to the protests. Strand shot back that Wallace was "intellectually dishonest." When Pauling wrote strong letters of protest, both as an alumnus and the president of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Strand took him on as well. "I would have been surprised if you had taken any other view than that which you have expressed," he wrote Pauling. "If by this action OSC has lost your respect and support, all I can say is that your price is too high. We'll have to get along without your aid." Spitzer took his case to the American Association of University Professors, but the group, concerned with being seen as too "pink," refused to back him up. Unable to get another job in chemistry, Spitzer eventually quit the field, left the country, and started a new life in Canada.

  At the same time, and closer to home, the regents of the University of California announced a new loyalty oath system for employees in the spring of 1949, both to counter the public impression—fostered by much-ballyhooed HUAC and local legislative investigations—that they harbored Reds in their Berkeley atomic research establishment and to forestall what they saw as a more repressive loyalty oath program being proposed in the state legislature. The regents' plan was to have faculty members swear in writing that they were not members of the Communist party.

  While most faculty members were compliant, a number refused to sign the oath. Various negotiations between the faculty and the regents shrank the number of nonsigners until only a handful were left; these were dismissed for wanting to keep their political views private. One of them was John O'Gorman, another of Pauling's former students, who was relieved of his teaching position at UC Santa Barbara. A highly skilled chemist, O'Gorman spent a year as a hired hand on a ranch while looking for other work. Pauling helped him as much as he could, writing strong letters of recommendation and giving O'Gorman encouragement, but the young chemist’s academic career was irrevocably delayed.

  Spitzer, O'Gorman, and a dozen other researchers who contacted Pauling after being thrown out of work because of their political beliefs made clear the human toll of the anti-Communist campaign. Seeing scientific careers crippled because of the loyalty program toughened Pauling's commitment to fighting it. Without exception, he tried to help any scientist who came to him with a complaint of being unfairly treated because of the witch-hunts. He did not hire any of the men himself—he was extremely selective in choosing his research group and sensitive to the likelihood that the Caltech board of trustees would veto a politically controversial hire—but he did write dozens of letters of recommendation, using his pull as American Chemical Society president and as a well-known researcher to find work for them. It was almost impossible. Once a researcher, especially a young scientist just beginning a career, was labeled a security risk, a loyalty oath refusenik, or a pinko, most institutions refused to hire him. The risks were too great, especially for any laboratory receiving federal funds and therefore subject to the loyalty program—which, after the war, meant the majority of university labs. It was a situation analogous to that faced by blacklisted writers and directors in the movie industry, but it involved many more people and much less publicity. A few of the blacklisted scientists found work in private industrial laboratories. Others—dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds, no one knows how many— gave up.

  Pauling began speaking out against the loyalty oath system whenever he could. In May 1949 he sat on an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) panel on academic freedom in Los Angeles, where he stated in front of reporters that he did not think teachers should be dismissed for any reason other than not doing their job—simply being a Communist, in other words, was not reason enough. The L.A. Times attacked Pauling's stand in an editorial, reasoning that "nobody can be a Communist and exercise academic freedom." The headline in the Pasadena paper read: "Pauling OKs Red Teachers."

  In the fall of 1949, Pauling announced that he would sponsor and lead the U.S. delegation to the controversial American Continental Conference for World Peace to be held in Mexico City, a gathering of delegates from all over the Western Hemisphere designed to address the growing tension between the United States and the USSR. The conference was promptly—and, it was later shown, correctly—criticized as Communist-inspired and -organized, but that, of course, did not bother the Paulings. They
loved Mexico City—Ava Helen was becoming an admirer of folk art from around the world and spent time combing the mercados for pieces to add to her collection—but were less enthusiastic about the meeting, which seemed to consist of speech after long-winded speech defending the Soviet Union and attacking the United States. When it came Pauling's turn, he typically went his own way. His keynote address ranged from standard socialist anti-imperialism—"We see the smaller nations of the world forced effectively to abandon their national sovereignty through the exercise of economic pressure by a rich and powerful neighbor engaged in a program of monopolistic industrial expansion and economic empire-building"—to a purposeful and carefully evenhanded denouncement of both the United States' and the USSR's policies of curtailing freedom and preparing for war. The audience, expecting another one-sided attack on the Yankees, responded with lukewarm applause.

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  Witch-hunts aside, there were plenty of reasons to be fearful. Three weeks after the Mexico City conference, it was announced that the Russians had successfully tested their own atomic bomb. One week after that, on October 1, 1949, the People's Republic of China was officially established, bringing the world's most populous nation under Communist control.

  The Cold War began in earnest that fall. The Republicans blamed the "loss of China" on shortcomings in the Democrat-run State Department, possibly due to subversive influences, kicking off an internal purge that would rid State of its last New Dealers and bring a new right-wing slant to American foreign policy.

  The Soviet bomb was even more frightening. In a flash it seemed that America's atomic security blanket, its only counterbalance to the huge Soviet army, had been ripped away. It was forgotten that America's atomic scientists had been telling everyone for years that it was only a matter of time until the USSR had the bomb. The cold warriors insisted that there had to be espionage involved, and the hunt was on for atomic spies. The media played up every new rumor. More than ever, it was open season on Reds and Red sympathizers.

  By 1950 the combination of world events and domestic anticommunism had shifted the majority of liberals to a new, more "tough-minded" set of beliefs. But Pauling changed neither his message nor the manner in which it was delivered. The Chinese people had a right to determine their own method of government, through revolution if necessary, he insisted. The Soviet atomic bomb was not a threat, he said, but "a warning to the people of the world and a potent incentive to the nations of the world to resume negotiations, through the United Nations organization, for the establishment of an effective system of international control of atomic energy."

  As others melted away from the old causes, Pauling stood alone, an increasingly visible target. In California, the Tenney Committee's file on him grew fat with newspaper reports of his speeches on atomic energy and civil rights. Many of the clippings were from the Communist press, papers like the Daily Worker—a major source of information for committee researchers—that carried glowing reports each time Pauling gave a speech or participated in a protest. By late 1949, the Tenney Committee had decided Pauling was a leader of "the California agitation."

  Pauling's file was shared enthusiastically with the FBI and the anti-Communist press, and Pauling's name began to appear regularly in right-wing lists of suspected Reds. Stubbornly independent, secure in his work, and confident that he was right, Pauling ignored it all.

  Proper Restraint

  But Caltech's president, Lee DuBridge, could not. The son of a YMCA athletics instructor from the Midwest, DuBridge, according to one science historian, was a man with "simple tastes, boundless energy, and an uncomplicated eagerness to do something important." DuBridge was relatively young—-just Pauling's age—slight, a bit boyish-looking, a good fund-raiser, an outstanding administrator with strong Washington connections, and a man whose enormous self-confidence matched even Pauling's. Of his wartime success guiding the Rad Lab, for example, he was fond of saying, "The atom bomb only ended the war. Radar won it."

  After arriving in Pasadena to great fanfare, DuBridge threw himself into modernizing Caltech. He started by rethinking the institute's creaky administrative system, quickly disbanding the joint faculty-trustee Executive Council in which Pauling had been prominent and replacing it with a separate board of trustees and a committee of division chairmen with reduced power. This was a mixed blessing for Pauling, effectively stripping him of much of the institutional influence he had enjoyed since the end of the war but also freeing him from unwanted administrative duties. DuBridge then won the hearts of the faculty by streamlining and updating Millikan's idiosyncratic salary system, giving almost everyone a 30 percent raise. It was the start, remembered one Caltech chemistry professor, of "a golden era."

  Pauling withheld judgment. He had known DuBridge since the 1920s, when the young physicist had come to Caltech for two years as a National Research Council fellow. Although not close friends, they were on a first-name basis, saw each other socially, and admired each other professionally.

  Whatever warmth there had been, however, began to cool soon after DuBridge arrived. Pauling and the new president simply did not get along well. Part of the reason was scientific. DuBridge was a physicist, and he put a great deal of effort and money into revitalizing the Caltech physics division, which had lost its preeminent position under the aging Millikan. He was less comfortable with chemistry, and especially with Pauling's approach to it. Millikan and many of the older trustees would have given DuBridge an unflattering version of Pauling's actions around the time of Noyes's death, and the new president was also able to talk with Tolman, Yost, and other Noyes-era faculty members unhappy with Pauling's commitment to chemical biology, a fascination, they thought, that was taking the division too far from its roots in physical chemistry. There was a feeling that Pauling worked hard to get funding for only his own pet projects, making poor relations of chemical engineering and inorganic chemistry. DuBridge would also have heard about Pauling's troubled foray into immunology and ongoing difficulty in producing artificial antibodies.

  So, while DuBridge publicly called Pauling's and Beadle's grand plan to mount a joint chemical-biological attack on the molecular basis of life "one of the most important enterprises in the country," privately he was cool toward Pauling's scheme. When Pauling wrote him enthusiastically about angling for a huge bequest to fund a basic research attack on cancer, for instance, DuBridge's initial thought was to make sure that physical chemistry and chemical engineering were funded first. Pauling understood quickly that he did not have DuBridge's full confidence, and the relationship between the two men became reserved and somewhat distant.

  Politics also came between the president and his chemistry chairman. Although raised in a Republican household, DuBridge considered himself a liberal and proved it by fighting hard against early drafts of the May-Johnson bill, supporting the dissemination of information by the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS) about the atomic bomb and speaking out strongly against the witch-hunts. He was for peace as much as the next man and thought there was a role for scientists in bringing it about. "It is not the job of the scientist to be primarily a politician, a sociologist, a military leader or a preacher," he told the audience in a Caltech commencement speech in 1947. But "the scientist or engineer—like every other human being—bears also the responsibility of being a useful member of his community . . . and should speak on issues which can be addressed with competence—including joining hands with other citizens when called to tasks of peace."

  That sounded good to Pauling, but DuBridge's politics was tempered by his skill as a consummate team player. A good president had to be able to shuttle easily between conservative Caltech trustees, liberal faculty, and numerous governmental and scientific advisory groups. DuBridge became an archetypal postwar insider-scientist, a man at home in classroom, boardroom, laboratory, and government office. From that standpoint, he realized that there had to be some rules, even if unspoken, guiding the political activities of scientists. In the years followi
ng the war, the American public—dazzled by the magic of atomic power, worried about enormous questions of national security, and concerned about the technical details of arms development— asked scientists for answers. For a time, scientists were thought of as mental supermen, and their opinions were given special attention.

  In DuBridge's mind, that also conferred on researchers what he called "special obligations." He wrote his faculty soon after arriving as president that Caltech was not in the business of censoring the right of its scientists to speak as private citizens, but warned that they should strive to be accurate and balanced, and exercise "proper restraint." Special care should be taken to ensure that private opinions were not confused with institutional positions. If these guidelines were followed by a faculty member, he wrote, "the Institute is prepared to defend his freedom of speech, of teaching, and of research."

  The key phrase was "proper restraint." When the Cold War swung into full gear, the vast majority of scientists translated the phrase as "silence." By 1949, scientists, like everyone else, were having second thoughts about any political action that could be perceived as left-wing. Most researchers began observing a set of unwritten, unspoken rules: If possible, confine your political activities to the Washington advisory system; limit political activities to a small proportion of your time; restrict your comments to your areas of expertise; keep your political opinions moderate. As long as everyone played by the rules, the relationship between science, government, and the public would be smooth, and money would continue to flow.