by Andrew Brown
The CSAWG by no means restricted itself to letter writing and philosophical arguments. In Cambridge, it rented advertising hoardings to display posters calling attention to the increasing risk of war: one poster which read ‘Fascism means mass murder and war’ was disallowed by the hoarding’s owner on the grounds that it might be libellous to Fascism!10 In July 1935, the group produced an Air Display Special newspaper to be distributed at Duxford air-field near Cambridge. The King was coming to take the fly-past, and the Cambridgeshire police decided to confiscate all copies of the Special in case he saw one. Wooster, as chairman of CSAWG sued the Chief Constable and won – he was awarded £1 in damages.
Bernal’s summer vacation in 1935 was largely taken up with meetings of politically minded scientists. In August, he went to Oxford for a symposium on academic freedom: other committee members included Patrick Blackett, Bertrand Russell, Sir Frederick Hopkins, Needham and Hal Waddington, the geneticist. The committee saw the preservation of free speech as its main task; Bernal seconded a motion that the justification for scientific work lay in the possibility it offered for a general and progressive increase in welfare and culture for all. He proposed that another representative committee should be elected to coordinate such efforts, because scientists had to do it for themselves – bodies such as the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), the Royal Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) had taken no action to further scientific research to meet human needs.11 The resolution was carried but in the wider world there were already notable figures registering their disagreement with Bernal’s repeated calls for central planning of scientific research. The first and most weighty dissenter was Professor A.V. Hill, Nobel Laureate and Secretary of the Royal Society, in his 1933 Huxley Memorial Lecture. He made curt reference to the Russian delegates, whom Bernal and his friends so admired at the 1931 International Congress in London. In Hill’s words, they wanted science to be regarded ‘simply as the handmaiden of social and economic policy’ whereas he argued that, in a sense, science was above the State. He proposed that ‘science should remain aloof and detached, not from any sense of superiority, not from any indifference to the common welfare, but as a condition of complete intellectual honesty. Emotion, entirely necessary in ordinary life, is utterly out of place in any scientific decisions. If science loses its intellectual honesty and its political independence, if – under Communism or Fascism – it becomes tied to emotion, to propaganda, to advertisement, to particular social or economic theories, it will cease altogether to have its general appeal, and its political immunity will be lost. If science is to continue to make progress, it must insist on keeping its traditional position of independence, it must refuse to meddle with, or to be dominated by, divinity, morals, politics or rhetoric.’12 Like the rest of the British scientific establishment, Hill abhorred what was taking place in Germany, where he said: ‘The facts are not in dispute.’ He was generally gloomy about the future, but insisted that those dismissed or persecuted should be offered opportunities to continue their work in England and other countries.
A few days after the Oxford meeting, Bernal was a leading figure at an East Anglian Peace Conference organized by Wooster; there were well over one hundred delegates from the CSAWG, peace groups, the TUC, the churches, the CPGB and the Labour Party. Bernal addressed the meeting, holding up two test tubes – one containing a liquid and the other a powder. The liquid, he informed them, was Phosgene under pressure and would kill everyone in the room if he dropped the tube. The powder was even more poisonous and had been developed to penetrate gas masks. One of the lingering memories of the Great War was the horror of poison-gas attacks in the trenches, and the prospect of civilian populations being gassed from aerial attacks was the cause of more fear in the early thirties than the threat of explosive bombs. In 1927, Bernal, writing under the pseudonym ‘X-ray’ had written an article in The Communist, entitled ‘The great poison-gas plot’.13 In the article, he suggested that the British Government, with the aid of university chemists, were constructing a formidable chemical warfare machine and that in the next war, it would be the innocent masses who were gassed from aeroplanes, unless capitalism was smashed and replaced by communism. In 1935, the Home Office’s Air-Raid Precautions (ARP) Department started issuing handbooks for householders who wished to reinforce their homes and make them gas-proof.14 Sage thought that this was a disingenuous attempt to reassure the public and he criticized the National Government for being ‘deliberately deceptive about air defence’.15 Bernal pointed out to his audience at the conference, some of whom were no doubt wondering whether he was being careful enough with the two deadly test tubes, the inherent unfairness of such a self-help policy that depended on property ownership and called for expenditure that was beyond the reach of many.
The economic crisis and now the advent of fascism had led Bernal to become a more serious student of Marxism, and he read and wrote about Engels’ philosophy as well as the history of Marxism. By 1933 he was a card-carrying member of the CPGB again, although the official party line still made no special dispensation for those from the bourgeois intellectual stratum. Palme Dutt, the chairman of the CPGB, writing in The Communist in September 1932 advised the intellectual who joined the Party ‘first and foremost… [to] forget that he is an intellectual… and remember only that he is a Communist’ so that he would concentrate on the paramount concern – the workers’ struggle. Bernal was able to accommodate this stricture by recognizing ‘Scientists are in an anomalous position. Socially they belong to the capitalists, culturally to the workers. The workers’ state needs science more than any other. The transition would be easier and progress more rapid if the bond between worker and scientist was already effective before it is achieved. Cooperation by the scientist in working-class movements removes his isolation and provides a firm basis of political support. In this way, and only in this way, can the scientist come to understand the full reality of the present situation and the practicability of the means of altering it.’16 Bernal saw himself as fulfilling this duty by resuscitating the AScW and making it a vital component of the British Trades Union Congress. On a personal level, he was prepared to submit to the revolutionary class movement and to forgo pleasures such as ‘comfort, work, sexual relations’ expecting instead the unpleasantness of ‘persecution, loss of work, imprisonment’.17 Fortunately for Sage, no such sacrifices would be necessary.
Like many European communists in the early thirties, Bernal thought that the Soviet Union represented the closest to an ideal, progressive society, and that the power of capitalism would soon be broken in Western Europe. While the pulse of England seemed imperturbable, the heartbeat of France positively raced at the prospect of revolution. During the time that MacDonald’s National Government had been in power, France had seen half a dozen administrations come and go. There was increasing industrial strife in Northern France; the advent of Hitler emboldened anti-Semitic and anti-communist factions, as well as activating left-wing groups, who perceived the immediate threat of fascism. Tensions increased in a series of fascist demonstrations and communist counter-demonstrations. They came to a head in February 1934, when another weak government tottered under the weight of a major financial scandal, the Stavisky affair. Right wing opponents of the government took to the streets of Paris, where they clashed with the socialists; the police lost control and opened fire, killing fourteen and injuring hundreds. Neither side drew back in the wake of the violence, and the French Communist Party (PCF) became a major political force for the first time.
Bernal made a visit to Paris in the spring of 1934 to assess the state of strife for himself. The French communists had no objections to intellectuals taking high-profile positions and listened especially to Paul Langevin, a leading physicist, intimate friend of Mme. Curie’s and party member since 1920. Langevin was supported in his political activities by his protégé, Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Joliot-Curie and Bernal could have been brothers – not
only did they have similar faces with bright smiles and long, pointed noses, but each was a brilliant talker, at ease in any company – and both belonged in the first echelon of scientists of their generation. Joliot-Curie with his wife, Irène (Mme. Curie’s daughter), as recently as January 1934 had discovered the phenomenon of artificial radioactivity and identified the first artificial (man-made) radioactive isotope. Langevin and Joliot-Curie, once they had adjusted to Bernal’s French, which still bore the New Orleans dialect from his mother’s early tuition, found him to be a sincere and energetic comrade. For his part, Bernal was especially struck by Langevin’s personal example of putting the ideals of social justice as a citizen ahead of his brilliant achievements as a scientist. This quality first became evident when Langevin was a research student under J.J. Thomson at the Cavendish in 1898, and he signed a public letter protesting about the Dreyfus affair. He told Bernal, wistfully, ‘Those were happy times when the fate of a single man was so valuable that it could excite the whole of mankind.’18 Now that the fascists in France were emboldened by Hitler’s regime in Germany and Mussolini’s in Italy, Langevin was outspoken in pointing out the threat to the French Republic and to human liberty. He founded the Comité de Vigilence des Intellectuels Anti-Fascistes and inspired Bernal. The words he used to justify his extensive political activities were often quoted by Bernal in later years, when he was challenged about the amount of time he was spending away from his laboratory: ‘The scientific work which I can do, can be done, and will be done, by others, possibly soon, possibly not for some years; but unless the political work is done there will be no science at all.’19 Langevin was instrumental in forming the Front Populaire, in which the PCF were encouraged by Moscow to affiliate with organized labour and socialist groups in a unified movement against the fascist menace. This ultimately resulted in the election of Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in June 1936.20
Fired by Langevin’s example, Bernal campaigned for an English equivalent to the Comité de Vigilence. The organization, which became known as For Intellectual Liberty (FIL), held its first meeting on 5th December 1935 in the Gordon Square rooms of Dr Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s psychiatrist brother. Virginia Woolf wrote to her nephew, Julian Bell, about the gathering: ‘We had such a meeting at Adrian’s last night to form a group to encourage the French… There were dear old Peter and Aldous and Auden; besides a mass of vociferous nonentities, chiefly journalists and scrubby men with rough hair – you know the sort.’21 Bell also heard from his mother, Vanessa, about the meeting: ‘a most peculiar assembly… the meeting argued and argued, mostly as to whether to form a new society… I think in the end they just elected a committee… everyone was asked to subscribe ten shillings. I daresay it’s really a very good thing to get people to commit themselves to being anti-fascist while it’s still a very remote danger in England…’22 Bernal, Margaret Gardiner and Kingsley Martin formed the FIL delegation to an international anti-fascist rally in Paris in early January 1936. At the second meeting of FIL in March 1936, there was a noticeably larger contingent of scientists present (Blackett, Dorothy Crowfoot, Waddington, Dorothy Wrinch and Zuckerman), who were presumably brought along by Sage. The literary members were still dominant and Aldous Huxley was elected FIL’s first president, with Leonard Woolf as vice-president; Margaret Gardiner became honorary secretary. Bernal proposed a resolution, which was discussed at some length, amended and passed by the meeting. It stated that: ‘This meeting of members of the learned and liberal professions resolves to set up a council broadly representative of those who feel the need for united action in defence of peace, liberty and culture.’23
FIL set out initially to oppose the government’s rearmament policy, and together with the Comité de Vigilence published a letter in the New Statesman (Kingsley Martin, editor) calling for general disarmament, a reconsideration of Germany’s economic difficulties and a universal treaty of peace. The signatories included Langevin and the Joliot-Curies for the Comité de Vigilence, and Huxley, E.M. Forster, and Gowland Hopkins for FIL. Curiously Bernal never signed any of the numerous FIL letters to the press, but as they were all typed and circulated by Margaret Gardiner, it seems likely that he had a role in drafting many of them. In April 1936, FIL took up the cause of Carl von Ossietzky, the German journalist and pacifist, who was interned without trial by the Nazis in 1933. They wrote a letter supporting him for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was awarded in November 1936. Bernal and Margaret attended FIL meetings assiduously, as noted by Virginia Woolf in a lament to Julian Bell in June 1936: ‘Societies seem wrong for me, as I do nothing; with Leonard meeting a dozen times a week and filling the drawing room with Bernal and Miss Gardiner and Ha [Margary Fry, the social reformer and Principal of Somerville College, Oxford] and Aldous we do our bit for liberty … I assure you, never a day passes but we don’t get asked to sign a protest, telegraph a message, or join a new group.’24 Virginia’s study was next to the drawing room and she complained to Ethel Smyth, the composer and suffragette, ‘Still though I withdraw, Leonard doesn’t. Last winter the bray and drone of those tortured voices almost sent me crazy – meetings in the next room.’25
Within the Woolf’s drawing room, there was a more meditative tension between Aldous Huxley and Bernal. In The World, the Flesh & the Devil, Bernal had identified Huxley as a writer opposed to the march of technology and to the potential of science to change the human condition. Since then, Huxley had published Brave New World in which he depicted a dehumanized utopia, where individual differences are eroded through biological and psychological manipulation. Brave New World contrasted starkly with Bernal’s optimism about the social benefits of science. But Huxley was a powerful advocate for liberty and peace and a nationally known figure, so that Bernal was quite happy to have him as the FIL president.
Although the destruction of academic liberty and traditional tolerance in Germany was plain to many by 1933, the more harrowing facts about the Soviet Union, while available, were generally disbelieved by British intellectuals. Muggeridge wrote accurate first-hand reports in the Manchester Guardian of the politically driven famine in the Ukraine, where 5 million or so died in 1932–3, but such horrors could not be accepted by those, like Bernal, who had made an emotional commitment to socialism. They were comforted by their own memories of the Soviet Union, overlooking just how limited their experiences were, and their faith was reinforced by the good opinion of others. Muggeridge was no match for his wife’s relatives, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who wrote of their visits to the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933 that the government had no option but to drive out ‘the universally hated kulaks’ who had sabotaged the grain harvest out of spite. Bernard Shaw, a writer whom Sage read avidly as an undergraduate, wrote a flippant letter to The Times after a chauffeur-driven tour of the USSR saying that ‘tales of a half-starved population dwelling under the lash of a ruthless tyrant’ were nonsense26 – a reassuring riposte to any scare stories appearing in the Guardian. The politically active Cambridge scientists, like Bernal and Blackett, forgot their customary scepticism and embraced the full Soviet mythology, adding their voices to the chorus of propaganda.
The first, and almost the only scientist in Great Britain to bring his critical faculties to bear on the divergent information emerging from the USSR was Michael Polanyi, a man who ‘in a flock of black sheep… shocked many by seeming almost white’.27 A Hungarian Jew by birth, he had worked at the Institute of Fibre Chemistry in Dahlem after the Great War, where he made seminal contributions to X-ray crystallography including, with Mark and Weissenberg, the rotating crystal technique. After a few years, Polanyi returned to his first scientific love, the kinetics of chemical reactions, and became a professor of chemistry at Berlin University. In 1933 he resigned his life membership of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in protest against the Nazis expulsion of Jewish scientists from their posts, and with considerable reluctance accepted a chair in Physical Chemistry at Manchester University. His first non-scientific writing was an essa
y on Soviet economics, in which he combined evidence that he had gathered during repeated visits to the USSR with a detailed analysis of official Soviet documents. Even without realizing that these documents were fabricated to conceal the disastrous failures of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, Polanyi concluded that the nutritional value of food per head was considerably worse than it had been in pre-1914 Russia, and the housing of the workers (which had been described by a Soviet writer in 1928 as being more terrible than Engels had seen during the Industrial Revolution in England) ‘suffered a drastic deterioration during the following four years’.28 Polanyi also made an astute deduction about the state of public health – not surprising in the light of the two previous points – that the standardized death-rate (i.e. death-rate corrected for the population’s age profile) was more than double those of Western countries.
A second essay, ‘Truth and propaganda’, showed a deep understanding of the workings of a totalitarian state and contained a devastating critique of the Webb’s adulatory new book, Soviet Communism. He described how the modern dictators subvert ‘the machinery of democracy… to let the people show their enthusiasm for the reigning party’ a tactic which can only work if it is backed up by ‘swift and merciless’ police action at the behest of determined party members. To Polanyi, the technique of engineering public displays of support while ruthlessly eliminating any potential opposition should be plain to anyone ‘who is out of sympathy with the reigning party. If he cares little for either Communism or Fascism, the similarity of the various Party dictatorships will seem equally obvious to him.’29 He found the most unnerving aspect of the Webbs’ writings was their disregard for truth, a trait they shared with numerous other intellectuals. Until this failing was reversed and thinkers became inspired by ‘unflinching veracity’, they would forfeit ‘their right to restrain governments in the name of truth… [and] truth will remain powerless against propaganda’.30
