One might think that when a nation undergoes a revolutionary upheaval against its own political system and even against reason itself, the sons and daughters of Urania, the muse representing science, would be among the last to be touched. For it is generally agreed that research into the behavior of nature is as free from local political overtones as intellectual work can be, and that the achievements of a nation's major scientists - more than those of its poets or statesmen - are embedded in an inter national and intercultural system of recognition that is guaranteed by the consensual nature of scientific proof itself.
During the rise of some authoritarian regimes, such hopes for leniency in the treatment of scientists were indeed fulfilled. But during the ascent of fascism in Germany (and later in Austria), the world witnessed the enthusiastic persecution of scientists from the very start of the political upheaval. For Albert Einstein the clouds began to gather on the horizon even earlier.' Largely because of the outpouring of international acclaim after the November 1919 announcement of experimental support for the predictions of general relativity theory, Einstein came under vicious attack by both political and scientific extremists in Germany. The Ger man ambassador in London even felt constrained in 192.0 to warn his Foreign Office privately in a report that "Professor Einstein is just at this time for Germany a cultural factor of first rank. . .. We should not drive such a man out of Germany with whom we can carry on real cul ture propaganda (XM/fM?propggRM&:)."^ In 192.2., following the political assassination of the foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, the news spread that Einstein also was on the list of intended victims. Einstein felt it wise to make a long journey to the Far East and to Palestine, writing from Japan on December zo, 192.2., that he had "greatly welcomed" the oppor-
Emstein end tEe cn/tMre o / sconce
tunity for a lengthy absence from Germany so he could "escape the increasing danger." ^
Ten years later, the power of the state was placed in the hands of Hitler, and the long pent-up floodwaters of hatred finally broke through the dam, washing equally over everyone. Almost overnight, Jewish scien tists were dismissed from their posts at the universities and stricken from the rolls of honorific institutions, with virtually no audible protest being raised by their colleagues.
Of the lucky ones who escaped, about one hundred physicists found refuge and a new productive life in the United States between 1933 and 1941/ It has often been remarked that their flight turned the persona! tragedy, and the tragedy for Germany itself, into an unexpected boon for the intellectual and artistic life of their host country. More than that, in the physical sciences, so the story goes, the influx of refugees from Ger many, and later from fascist tyranny in Italy and Austria, provided the necessary critical infusion of high talent that helped to turn the United States rather suddenly into the world's preeminent country for the pursuit of frontier research. Indeed, when it became known in 1933 that Einstein was moving to America, rather than to any of the other countries offering him a haven, the prominent French physicist Paul Langevin was quoted as having announced that the United States would now become "the cen ter of the natural sciences."^ Lord Rutherford, among others, expressed himself similarly.
These perceptions were not wholly mistaken. But they hid a more in teresting and more complex truth that, through the work of a number of scholars, has recently become more evident.^ It is a truth that I wish to illustrate in this chapter and that may be put succinctly in the following way. At least with respect to the physicists who escaped Hitler's hench men and fled to the United States, a remarkable symbiosis occurred. While the United States gave European physicists a new life, they in turn provided a new source of energy and a new style of research. This sym biosis would have been impossible without the prior development of a high level of scientific accomplishment in the host country. Einstein did not come to a scientific backwater. On the contrary, he chose to come to the United States chiefly because he was impressed with the achieve ments already made there (what Robert Oppenheimer later called, with simple understatement, "a rather sturdy indigenous effort"''), with the quality of the colleagues, with the conditions of work, and with the bright promise for the future of science in the country. In short, the izq
Ernstem s decision to mtm/grirtc IZ5 United States was, in 1933, a country of natural choice for a physicist whose first ioyafty was the pursuit of science.
First contact miYF Amentvz
Albert Einstein's search for a country of refuge and his eventuat decision to settle in the United States form a good lens with which to study the migration of physicists to the United States during the 1930s. When Hitler came to power, Einstein was fifty-four years old and intensely occupied with his work in general relativity theory and cosmology. As it happened, in January 1933 he was away from Berlin on a visit to the United States. He vowed that he would not return to his positions at the university in Berlin and the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft as long as the Nazis were in charge. Suddenly, he was a man without a home, spending the first uncertain months in Belgium and England. His apartment in Berlin and his summer cottage had been raided and sealed, and he had renounced his German citizenship.
In September 1933 he found himself in England, shortly before having to journey back to the United States to spend a few months at the Cali fornia Institute of Technology (where R. A. Millikan had arranged for Einstein's periodic visits). Einstein did not know that these were to be his last few weeks in Europe. It was by no means clear where he might settle or which of the many options he would choose. One attractive possibility was England. In the preamble to his Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in June, Einstein had clearly expressed the hope that this would be the beginning of a closer association.^ A bill was then pending in the House of Commons to give him the status of a naturalized citizen. Frederick A. Lindemann at Oxford was hard at work arranging for an appointment there.
But offers came to Einstein from many other directions, and in a cer tain spirit of absent-mindedness, he seems to have accepted quite a few of them. Chairs were waiting for Einstein, or were being arranged for him, in Belgium, Spain, and France, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the newly formed Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. To Lan- gevin, who begged him to consider a post being created for him at the College de France, he wrote with characteristic perception, "I find myself in an embarrassing situation, exactly the opposite of that of my com patriots who were chased out of Germany." ^
12.6 E m s t C t W C M /tM r e o / SC teM C C
from the D<2t7y Express, he provided a further glimpse of his unsettled state of mind at the time. Einstein told of Millikan's proposal that he make his home at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, then significantly added: "They have there the finest observatory in the world. That is a temptation. But although I try to be universal in thought, I am European by instinct and inclination. 1 shall want to re
turn here." He never did.
The first indication of the trail that would take him, later in 1933, once and for all to the United States can be found in Einstein's correspondence 20 years earlier. Einstein wrote on October 14, 1913, to George Ellery Hale, the astronomer at Mount Wilson Observatory. Working in Zurich on his first version of general relativity theory, Einstein was at that time by no means a world celebrity. (On the contrary, appended to Einstein's inquiry is a plea from one of his colleagues, Julius Maurer, whom Hale knew, asking the privilege of "a friendly reply to Mr. Professor Dr. Ein stein, my honorable colleague at the Polytechnical school.") Einstein was asking the American astronomer's advice on whether one might observe the bending of light from stars near the rim of the sun, when observed against the background of the sun (without an eclipse). Although Ein stein's project was not realistic, he was right to consult Hale, whose "rich experience in these matters" Einstein said he valued. Hale was only one of a whole galaxy of American scientists who had demonstrated their experimental prowess. The work of Henry Rowland, Albert Michelson, Theodore Lyman, and R. A. Millikan (not to mention the research of Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Henry) was known to every physicist.
Nor should one overlook the early signs of excellence in theoretical contributions of the Americans. Einstein's own work became the focus of theoretical studies soon after his seminal 1903 publications - for ex ample, by G. N. Lewis at MIT, working alone as well as with his student R. C. Tolman and in collaboration with Edwin Bidwel! Wilson; and by H. A. Bumstead at Yale. As Stanley Goldberg has pointed out in his case study of the American response to Einstein's relativity theory, this work by Americans showed a serious understanding of relativity long before the same could be said of some more prominent European scientists, and it exhibited in addition a characteristic "brashness or boldness" of spirit.*" For example, the Americans accepted the principles of relativity theory as expenmertt<!//y proven (which Einstein himself, aware of the postulational content of his theory, did not claim), and most of them accepted the need to abandon the ether, which many French and British
Einstein's decision to im migrate 12-7 scientists did not do for a tong time. The pragmatism of these American theorists, which seems to me part of the antimetaphysicat approach that characterized the American style and which tater so upset the social scientists arriving from Europe, was an additional early indicator of the vigorous growth of science in America during the early decades of this century.
Einstein himself had noticed this much during his first visit to the United States in the spring of 192.1. He had seen a number of universities and was impressed by the promise of the young Americans there, with their unselfconscious manners and their uninhibited urge to do research. As Philipp Frank reported Einstein to have said about the trip, "much is to be expected from American youth: a pipe as yet unsmoked, young and fresh."*'
When he returned from that visit, Einstein published an essay, "My first impression of the U.S.A.," in which he made six perceptive, rather Tocquevillian points:
1. Contrary to the widespread stereotype, there is in the United States, not a preoccupation with materialistic things, but an "idealistic out look"; "knowledge and justice are ranked above wealth and power by a large section." (The tumultuous welcome that Einstein was forced to suffer made this point obvious to him.)
2. The superiority of the United States "in matters of technology and organization" has consequences at the everyday level; objects are more solid, houses more practically designed.
3. What "strikes a visitor is the joyous, positive attitude to life." The American is "friendly, self-confident, optimistic - and without envy. The European finds intercourse with Americans easy and agreeable." The American lives for the future: "life for him is always becoming, never being." (Einstein chose not to remark on the occasional evidence of xenophobia.)
4. The American is less an individualist than the European is; he lays "more emphasis on the tee than the 1." Therefore, there is more unifor
mity of outlook on life and in moral and esthetic ideas. But, therefore, one can also find more cooperation and division of labor, essential factors in America's economic superiority.
3. The well-to-do in America have impressive social consciences, shown, for example, in the energy they throw into works of charity.
6. Last but not least, "I have warm admiration for the achievements of American institutes of scientific research. We are unjust in attempting to
12.8 Einstein nnd tEe cn/tMte o/ science
ascribe the increasing superiority of American research work exclusively to superior wealth; devotion, patience, and the spirit of comradeship, and a talent for cooperation play an important part in its success."
The Germany to which Einstein had returned in June 192.1 offered a bleak contrast. He found the campaign against him progressing more viciously than ever. The very same attitudes that had assured him a good reception in the United States seemed to outrage his opponents in Ger many. They saw him as a pacifist, an internationalist who had visited the former "enemy country" less than three years after the end of World War f, a "formalistic" theoretician whose work challenged common sense, a nonconformist, a stubborn and vocal defender of human rights, skeptical of the religious establishment, a Zionist, and a Jew. Einstein himself must have seen in which direction history was lurching: Philipp Frank recalls Einstein telling him in 1921 that he would not likely remain in Germany longer than another ten years.The prediction was close to the mark.
Bni/ding tEe scienti/ic potentin/
Another indication of the "rather sturdy indigenous effort" and the rapid growth of physics in the United States, even before the refugees arrived in force in the 1930s, is the fact that fully thirteen hundred new Ph.D.s in physics were awarded in the United States in that difficult decade. As if in preparation for this growth, the previous decade had seen a lively exchange across the Atlantic, in both directions. More European post doctoral physicists chose to go to the United States than anywhere else; conversely, many young Americans went to European centers for a year or two, not as untutored beginners but, as E E Rabi was recently quoted by Fritz Stern, "knowing the libretto but learning the tune." '** Rabi re calls that while traveling through Europe between 1923 and 1927, he encountered other young American physicists such as E. C. Kemble, E. U. Condon, H. P. Robertson. F. Wheeler Loomis, Robert Oppen- heimer, W. V. Houston, Linus Pauling, Julius Stratton, J. C. Slater, and W. W. Watson. In her study of the American physics community, Katherine Sopka lists thirty-two Americans studying at European centers of quantum physics between 1926 and 1929.*^ Of these visitors, most of whom soon achieved major recognition, about 40 percent were sup ported by the new Guggenheim Fellowship Program, with the next most
Einstein is decision to ;n!ni/gMte 129 frequent support coming from Rockefeller-financed grants made by the Internationa! Education Board and the National Research Council. In short, in terms of the quality and number of its young scientists and the scale of institutional backing, the United States, without planning it, was getting ready, in a way no other country was doing, to become the recipient of the "brain drain," when the time for that would come.^
To the evidence given of the transatlantic building of mutual com patibility, competence, and coHeagueship must also be added the impor tant role of European physicists who traveled to the United States on lecture tours. During the twelve years following Einstein's first visit, many of the foremost physicists of Europe came to give seminars and lec tures, including (in chronological order) Marie Curie, Francis W. Aston, Hendrik A. Lorentz, Charles G. Darwin, Arnold Sommerfeld, J. J. Thomson, Niels Bohr, Oskar Klein, Ernest Rutherford, Paul Ehrenfest, Arthur S. Eddington, Peter Debye, Max Born, Arthur Haas, Abram F. Joffe, Erwin Schrodinger, E. A. Milne, W. L. Bragg, Leon BriHouin, James Franck, H. A. Kramers, Hermann Wey), Werner Heisenberg, P. A. M. Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Max von Laue, Otto Stern, Gregor Went- zet, Jakov Frenkel, R. H. Fowler, and Wolfgang Pauli.Some of them visited more than once or served as guest professors for a term or a year.
Moreover, there was a relatively small but very significant influx of European scientific immigrants who settled in the United States be fore the upheaval of 1933, thereby further strengthening the founda tion that was being laid. The list includes such distinguished names as W. F. G. Swann (1913), L. Silberstein (192.0), P. Epstein (1921), A. L. Hughes (1923), H. Mueller and F. Zwicky (1923), K. F. Herzfeid (1926), S. A. Goudsmit and G. E. Uhlenbeck (1927), L. H. Thomas (1929), G. H. Dieke, Maria Goeppert, J. von Neumann, O. Oldenberg, and E. P. Wigner (1930), and R. A. Ladenburg, C. Lanczos, and A. Lande (1931).^ Afterwards, the storm in Europe brought to these shores within the next five years such well-established or younger physicist-immigrants as O. Stern, H. Weyl, F. Bloch, G. Gamow, H. A. Bethe, J. Franck, V. Weisskopf, and E. Teller. They came to a country that was by no means unacquainted with or unprepared for their scientific interests or tastes.
In 1921, Einstein had remarked in passing on the custom of private philanthropy in the United States. He could not then have known how greatly it would aid the intellectual development of his future country of asylum, and its story still merits much detailed research. One example
130 Einstein and tile cn/tMte o/ science
was the rote that the grants and poticies of the Rockefeller Foundation ptayed in hetping physics in the United States to come of age, particutarty with respect to the rise of quantum mechanics in the 192.0s and to the emergence and growth of nuctear physics in the 1930s. The Rockefeller- financed agencies atso helped greatty in the internationahzation of phys ics. The foundation's aid to physicists invotved at least seven factors:
1. Supported by Rockefeller funds, National Research Council (NRC) Fellowships to study physics had been given to 190 U.S. citizens by World War If. The list of young awardees contained a large proportion of later world leaders in their profession.
2.. Moreover, they studied at U.S. research centers that, in many cases, had been transformed in the late 1920s through the (Rockefeller) General Education Board's carefully placed gifts of about twenty million dollars