by Ray Monk
But what of Oppenheimer? Segrè has some equally tart observations about him. Oppenheimer, he says:
. . . was considered a demigod by himself and others at Berkeley, and as such he spake in learned and obscure fashions. Besides, he knew quantum mechanics well, and in this he was unique at Berkeley. He taught it in none too easy a fashion, which showed off his prowess and attracted a number of gifted students. Oppenheimer’s loyal disciples hung on his words and put on corresponding airs. Just as we in Rome had acquired Fermi’s intonation, in Berkeley Oppenheimer’s students walked as if they had flat feet, an infirmity of their master’s.
With regard to the celebrated cultural sophistication of Oppenheimer and his students, Segrè was not impressed:
Oppenheimer and his group did not inspire in me the awe that they perhaps expected. I had the impression that their celebrated general culture was not superior to that expected in a boy who had attended a good European high school. I was already acquainted with most of their cultural discoveries, and I found Oppenheimer’s ostentation slightly ridiculous. In physics I was used to Fermi, who had a quite different solidity, coupled with a simplicity that contrasted with Oppenheimer’s erudite complexities.
It is with regard to politics, however, that Segrè is especially damning. ‘Oppenheimer and most of his acolytes,’ he says, ‘followed the political line of the Communist Party of the United States, which was highly uncritical and simple-minded.’ He had the impression that Oppenheimer regarded him as a ‘great Fascist’ (‘I was a Fascist Party member, as every Italian state employee was required to be by law, but it did not take much acumen to figure out that I could not be a Fascist at heart’), while, according to him, Oppenheimer – in following the Communist Party line – ‘deemed that the European quarrels were caused by capitalist imperialists, and that Holy Communism would avoid them’.
In the light of the reports quoted earlier – that Oppenheimer’s faith in the Soviet Union was strongly undermined in the summer of 1938 – one might think Segrè misunderstood the degree to which Oppenheimer was prepared to follow slavishly the Communist Party line, or that at the very least he was exaggerating. What evidence there is, however, supports Segrè. A key event here is the Treaty of Non-Aggression, signed by Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939, which shocked most liberals and a good number of Communist Party members, and effectively put an end to the strategy Earl Browder had pursued throughout the 1930s of presenting the Communist Party as the upholder of, and natural heir to, the tradition of American liberalism. Indeed, the pact put Browder and the American Communist Party in an extraordinarily difficult position and ended any hope they might have had of continuing to be part of a broad ‘popular front’. After years of upholding communism as the one force that had the strength and determination to halt the spread of fascism in Europe, how could Browder and the Communist Party possibly justify an agreement – something close to an alliance – between the world’s most repugnant fascist state and its only communist state? Against his own inclinations, Browder was forced to insist in public that the pact was ‘a wonderful contribution to peace’ and to deny that it made Poland’s position more insecure. He, however, was obliged by his position to follow the party line; Oppenheimer was not.
In 1954 Oppenheimer mentioned the Nazi-Soviet pact as one of the things that influenced his ‘changing opinion of Russia’, but also insisted that this ‘did not mean a sharp break for me with those who hold to different views’. Those who held to different views, of course, included all who, despite everything, maintained the party line, for instance all of Oppenheimer’s friends and students – and there were many – who remained members of the Communist Party after the signing of the pact. One of those was Haakon Chevalier, who in his book Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship raises the question of the pact and then, ostensibly in order to illustrate the quality of Oppenheimer’s analyses of political events, offers the following account of Oppenheimer’s reaction to the anti-communist feeling that followed:
It was in the fall of 1939, too, that Opjefn42 proved himself to be such an impressive and effective political analyst. The Soviet-German pact, and later the invasion of Poland by the USSR and the Soviet war with Finland, had confused and upset many people, even among the most open-minded and liberal. Opje had such a simple, lucid way of presenting facts and arguments that one felt in him a kind of passionate commitment which was contagious. He communicated with extraordinary effectiveness his own conviction that political events were motivated human events that could be made to yield their significance if examined objectively, in the light of the factors that had conditioned them.
After reading this account, what Oppenheimer actually thought of the pact, or of the war, remains utterly opaque. The documentary record is a little clearer. In a letter to Willie Fowler at Caltech that seems to have been written on or about 9 September 1939, Oppenheimer writes: ‘I know Charlie [Lauritsen] will say a melancholy I told you so over the Nazisoviet [sic] pact, but I am not paying any bets yet on any aspect of the hocus-pocus except maybe that the Germans are pretty well into Poland. Ça stink.’
In the ensuing months of what is commonly called the ‘phoney war’, while no hostilities were exchanged between Germany and France or Britain, Poland was divided up between Germany and the Soviet Union and the latter invaded Finland. The belief that the Nazi-Soviet pact was nothing more than a cynical temporary agreement between two dictatorships, allowing each to expand without fear of the other, seemed to be amply confirmed. Moreover, because the Soviet Union seemed so indifferent to the plight of the European democracies – indeed, its propaganda seemed to hold the British Empire in greater contempt than Nazi Germany – and its foreign policy so out of keeping with anything with which American liberal opinion could sympathise, it seemed no longer possible, so long as the American Communist Party took its ‘line’ from Moscow, to believe that the views of the Party were those that a loyal American, concerned only with local, American issues, would have arrived at independently.
And yet, in his February 1940 pamphlet Report to our Colleagues mentioned previously,fn43 that is exactly the belief for which Oppenheimer tried to argue. Published under the auspices of the ‘College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California’, this pamphlet had as its purpose presenting to academic colleagues at Berkeley, Stanford and Caltech the political views of the discussion group/Communist Party unit to which Oppenheimer, Chevalier and others belonged. According to Gordon Griffiths, Oppenheimer was not the sole author of this pamphlet, but he ‘took special pride in it’.
How Oppenheimer could have been proud of the document is something of a puzzle, since it contains almost no original thought, being simply a presentation of the official Communist Party line, nor does it contain any fine writing or telling phrase; its style is that of a Party tract. What it seeks to persuade ‘colleagues’ of is that the attacks on the Communist Party made in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasions of Poland and Finland should be seen not in relation to global politics, but rather in relation to American politics and in particular the plight of the poor and the unemployed in the US. Instead of focusing on the pact made between Hitler and Stalin, the report urges, colleagues should look at the ‘strange things’ that were happening to the New Deal, and, in particular, to the cuts in relief funding that had been announced at both a federal level by Roosevelt and a local level by the California legislature. In this context, the report argues, it can be seen that the purpose of the attacks on communists is ‘to disrupt the democratic forces, to destroy unions in general and CIO [Congress of Industrial Organisations] unions in particular, to make possible the cutting of relief, to force the abandonment of the great program of peace, security and work that is the basis of the movement toward a democratic front’.
Despite its attempt to focus on issues such as poor relief and unemployment, what comes through most strongly in the Report is its echoing of the slogan of the Communist Party manifesto: ‘Keep Am
erica Out of the Imperialist War!’ The communists, the Report claims, possess ‘some of the clearest voices that oppose a war between the United States and Russia’, the silencing of which, it alleges, is the hidden motive behind the attacks being made on the Communist Party. It would, the report emphasises and reiterates, ‘be an evil thing for this country to go to war, or to join a war, against Russia’. Warming to its theme, it goes on: ‘In a war against Russia almost anything could be illegal except the rich making money and the poor dying.’
This fear of a war with Russia is evident too in the second and last Report to our Colleagues, published in April 1940, which states unequivocally: ‘There has never been a clearer issue than that of keeping this country out of the war in Europe.’ When the report tries to make this clarity apparent, however, it slips into communist rhetoric that makes uncomfortable reading for anyone inclined to think Segrè was being misleading about Oppenheimer’s political views:
Europe is in the throes of a war. It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out. We think, that is, that Roosevelt is not only a ‘war monger’ but a counter-revolutionary war-monger. We think it is this that has turned him from something of a progressive to very much of a reactionary.
So, why is it so clear that the US should stay out of the war? Because, it seems, if it stays out, the British Empire will collapse, which will be a good thing. But won’t that signal the victory of Nazism rather than of socialism? How does one get from the collapse of the British Empire to the ‘likely’ outcome of a socialist Europe? The most natural interpretation of this seems to be that Oppenheimer (and the ‘College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California’) foresees the defeat of Britain being followed by the defeat of a weakened Germany at the hands of the Soviet Union. If this is right (and it is hard to find an alternative that would make sense of the above passage), then, if anything, Segrè was being kind in his characterisation of Oppenheimer’s views (‘that the European quarrels were caused by capitalist imperialists, and that Holy Communism would avoid them’). Oppenheimer’s view seems rather to be: the war is actually a good thing, precisely because it is caused by capitalist imperialists, who, in defeating and weakening each other, will allow ‘socialism’, in the form of the Soviet Union, to triumph over Europe – but only if the US stays out of the struggle, thereby allowing the defeat of Britain to take place.
It is possible, I think, that these Reports to our Colleagues help to explain the curious avoidance of research into fission and its possible use in explosives by Oppenheimer and his students, despite their evident excitement at, and absorption in, the issue when it was first announced. Given the emphasis manifest in these reports on the need for the United States to stay out of the war, together with the repeatedly expressed fear that America would not stay out of the war, but rather go into it with the intention of fighting Russia, it seems at least possible that Oppenheimer and his students avoided work on the physics of fission because they did not want to contribute to a war they passionately believed the United States should not be involved in. One is reminded here of Felix Adler’s argument for American neutrality in the First World War, and of his denunciation of any scientist willing to put his or her services at the disposal of the war effort: ‘The time will come when that scientist will be considered and will consider himself a disgrace to the human race who prostitutes his knowledge of Nature’s forces for the destruction of his fellow men.’
Report to our Colleagues had originally been intended as an ongoing series of publications. The fact that there were only ever two of them, Chevalier says, is ‘for some reason which I have forgotten – possibly because of the rapidly changing perspectives in the world situation’. Certainly Oppenheimer’s own political perspective seems to have changed rapidly and fundamentally within just a few months of the publication of the second Report, the change prompted by sudden, drastic and shocking developments in the world. After the Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, the collapse of Holland and Belgium in May and the fall of France in June, was it possible for a liberal intellectual to continue to believe that it was of the utmost importance for the US to remain neutral? With most of Western Europe under the control of Hitler’s Germany, Spain under Franco and Italy under Mussolini, was it still possible to think that a socialist Europe was the ‘likely’ outcome of the war? And, finally, could Oppenheimer still believe, as he appears to have done up until April 1940, that the Soviet Union had acted wisely and in the interests of the ‘democratic front’ in signing a non-aggression pact with Germany, thereby standing by while this rapid expansion of the Reich took place?
If Hans Bethe’s recollections are accurate, the answer to all those questions is ‘no’. In the summer of 1940, Bethe met Oppenheimer at a conference held by the American Physical Society in Seattle from 18 to 21 June. On 20 June, Bethe and Oppenheimer (together with Volkoff and Snyder) took part in a seminar on ‘The Present Crisis in the Quantum Theory of Fields’. This was about a fortnight after the British evacuation from Dunkirk, two days after the German army marched into Paris and two days before the French surrender, when, at Hitler’s insistence, the armistice was signed in the very railway coach that had been used in November 1918 for the armistice that ended the First World War.
In these dark times, Bethe remembers a party of about ten people at the home of Edwin Uehling, previously a student of Oppenheimer’s and now a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. During his time at the conference Oppenheimer was a guest at the Uehlings’ house. At this party, Bethe recalls a conversation about the European situation in which there were expressed some deep anxieties about the future. Oppenheimer, Bethe remembers, addressed the group in the following words:
This is a time when the whole of western civilization is at stake. France, one of the great exponents of western civilization, has fallen, and we must see to it that Britain and the United States don’t fall as well. We have to defend western values against the Nazis. And because of the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact [i.e. the Nazi-Soviet pact] we can have no truck with the Communists.
Bethe thinks this may have been ‘the first occasion in which Oppenheimer talked about political matters not from the standpoint of the left, but from the standpoint of the West’. If Bethe’s recollections are accurate, then a mere two months after the publication of the second Report to our Colleagues, Oppenheimer had adopted exactly the view that he was, in that report, concerned to refute: namely, that it was important to take sides in the war in order to protect democracy against fascism.
However, apart from the remark ‘we can have no truck with the Communists’, Oppenheimer’s views, as reported by Bethe, are not quite as far from those of the American Communist Party as they might at first appear. As Maurice Isserman writes in his history of the American Communist Party:
The Communists, for all their hostility to the Allied cause, were unprepared for and dismayed by the swift collapse of French resistance in May 1940. They assumed, as Stalin had when he signed the non-aggression pact, that the German and French armies were relatively well matched. When and if the ‘phoney war’ ever came to an end, the Communists expected the conflict to turn into a stalemate similar to the one on the western front in the First World War.
Isserman provides telling quotations from the communist press during the sequence of Nazi victories. After the fall of Norway, the People’s World attacked Britain as ‘the greatest danger to Europe and all mankind’; after Beligium and Holland were overrun, the Daily Worker could still maintain: ‘This is not our war’; but, writes Isserman: ‘The fall of France eventually provoked some anxious second thoughts among Communists.’ Communists who had previously excused the Nazi-Soviet pact ‘now had to face up to the possibility that Hitler got the better bar
gain’. In June, the Daily Worker even printed a letter from one of its readers, asking the question that was surely on the minds of many communists in the summer of 1940: ‘Will not Hitler, in the event of a crushing victory over Great Britain and France, turn his armies against the USSR?’
It may be, as Bethe believed, that Oppenheimer’s speech to his fellow physicists in Seattle represented a shift in his allegiance away from the Communist Party and towards the West, as represented by Britain, France and the US, but, after the fall of Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France, and the apparent imminent fall of Britain, it is also clear that many American communists had begun to wonder whether their previous analysis of world events had been correct, whether the interests of the Soviet Union and socialism were really best served by the collapse of Great Britain and the non-intervention of the US. It was rather looking as though the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the US had a shared interest in defeating the (now massively extended) Third Reich.
Most Americans, of course, neither knew nor cared how American communists were reacting to the new, deeply alarming situation in Europe. What struck them was that the Communist Party was closely connected with the Soviet Union, which had signed a deal with Nazi Germany that had allowed – indeed, seemed designed to allow – that deeply alarming situation to occur. Thus was generated a ‘Red Scare’ that prefigured the anti-communism of the 1950s and made life extremely uncomfortable for communists in America. In June 1940, soon after the collapse of France, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, better known as the Smith Act, which required all resident non-citizens to be registered and fingerprinted. It also authorised the deportation of foreigners belonging to revolutionary groups, and, most damagingly for the Communist Party, made it a crime to conspire to advocate or teach the necessity or desirability of overthrowing the government. After this Act came into force, it was no longer necessary to prove that an individual had, in fact, acted to overthrow the government, nor that he or she had advocated the overthrow of the government; all that was necessary was to show that the individual in question had joined an organisation that favoured such advocacy. The Smith Act was hotly followed by the Voorhis Act, which required all organisations ‘subject to foreign control’ to register with the Justice Department.
