American Prometheus (5 page)

Born in 1868 to an Illinois family of abolitionists and freethinkers, Elliott became a beloved figure in the progressive humanist movement of New York City. A tall, affectionate man, Elliott was the pragmatist who put into practice Adler’s Ethical Culture principles. He built one of the country’s most successful settlement houses, the Hudson Guild, in New York’s poverty-stricken Chelsea district. A lifelong trustee of the ACLU, Elliott was politically and personally fearless. When two Austrian leaders of the Ethical Culture Society in Vienna were arrested by Hitler’s Gestapo in 1938, Elliott—at the age of seventy—went to Berlin and spent several months negotiating with the Gestapo for their release. After paying a bribe, Elliott succeeded in spiriting the two men out of Nazi Germany. When he died in 1942, the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin eulogized him as “a witty saint . . . a man who so loved people that no task to aid them was too small.”

It was to this “witty saint” that the Oppenheimer brothers were exposed throughout the years of their weekly dialogues in ethics class. Years later, when they were young men, Elliott wrote their father: “I did not know how close I could get to your boys. Along with you, I am glad and grateful for them.” Elliott taught ethics in a Socratic-style seminar where students discussed specific social and political issues. Education in Life Problems was a required course for all of the high school students. Often he would pose a personal moral dilemma for his students, such as asking them if they had a choice between a job teaching or a job that paid more working in Wrigley’s chewing gum factory—which would they choose? During Robert’s years at the school, some of the topics vigorously debated included the “Negro problem,” the ethics of war and peace, economic inequality and understanding “sex relations.” In his senior year, Robert was exposed to an extended discussion on the role of “the State.” The curriculum included a “short catechism of political ethics,” including “the ethics of loyalty and treason.” It was an extraordinary education in social relations and world affairs, an education that planted deep roots in Robert’s psyche—and one that would produce a bountiful harvest in the decades to come.

“I WAS AN UNCTUOUS, repulsively good little boy,” Robert remembered. “My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.” His sheltered home life had offered him “no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” But it had created an inner toughness, even a physical stoicism, that Robert himself may not have recognized.

Anxious to get him out of doors and among boys his own age, Julius decided to send Robert, at the age of fourteen, to a summer camp. For most of the other boys there, Camp Koenig was a mountain paradise of fun and camaraderie. For Robert, it was an ordeal. Everything about him made him a target for the cruelties young adolescents delight in inflicting on those who are shy, sensitive or different. The other boys soon began calling him “Cutie” and teased him mercilessly. But Robert refused to fight back. Shunning athletics, he walked the trails, collecting rocks. He made one friend, who recalled that Robert was obsessed that summer with the writings of George Eliot. The novelist’s major work,
Middlemarch,
appealed to him greatly, perhaps because it explored so thoroughly a topic he found so mysterious: the life of the inner mind in relation to the making and breaking of human relationships.

Then, however, Robert made the mistake of writing his parents that he was glad he had come to camp because the other boys were teaching him the facts of life. This prompted a quick visit by the Oppenheimers, and subsequently the camp director announced a crackdown on the telling of salacious stories. Inevitably, Robert was fingered for tattling, and so one night he was carried off to the camp icehouse, stripped and knocked about. As a final humiliation, the boys doused his buttocks and genitals with green paint. Robert was then left naked and locked inside the icehouse for the night. His one friend later said of this incident that Robert had been “tortured.” Robert suffered this gross degradation in stoic silence; he neither left the camp nor complained. “I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,” said his friend. “Not many boys would have—or could have—but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.” As his friends often discovered, Robert’s seemingly brittle and delicate shell actually disguised a stoic personality built of stubborn pride and determination, a characteristic that would reappear throughout his life.

Back in school, Robert’s highbrow personality was nurtured by the Ethical Culture School’s attentive teachers, all of whom had been carefully selected by Dr. Adler as models of the progressive education movement. When Robert’s math teacher, Matilda Auerbach, noticed that he was bored and restless, she sent him to the library to do independent work, and later he was allowed to explain to his fellow students what he had learned. His Greek and Latin instructor, Alberta Newton, recalled that he was a delight to teach: “He received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” He read Plato and Homer in Greek, and Caesar, Virgil and Horace in Latin.

Robert always excelled. As early as third grade, he was doing laboratory experiments and by the time he was ten years old, in fifth grade, he was studying physics and chemistry. So clearly eager was Robert to study the sciences that the curator at the American Museum of Natural History agreed to tutor him. As he had skipped several grades, everyone regarded him as precocious—and sometimes too precious. When he was nine, he was once overheard telling an older girl cousin, “Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.”

Robert’s peers thought him distant at times. “We were thrown together a lot,” said a childhood acquaintance, “and yet we were never close. He was usually preoccupied with whatever he was doing or thinking.” Another classmate recalled him sitting laconically in class, “exactly as though he wasn’t getting enough to eat or drink.” Some of his peers thought him “rather gauche . . . he didn’t really know how to get along with other children.” Robert himself was painfully aware of the costs of knowing so much more than his classmates. “It’s no fun,” he once told a friend, “to turn the pages of a book and say, ‘Yes, yes, of course, I know that.’ ” Jeanette Mirsky knew Robert well enough in their senior year to think of him as a “special friend.” She never thought of him as shy in the usual sense, only distant. He bore a certain “hubris,” she thought, of the kind that carries with it the seeds of its own destruction. Everything about Robert’s personality— from his abrupt, jerky way of walking to such little things as the making of a salad dressing—displayed, she thought, “a great need to declare his preeminence.”

Throughout his high school years, Robert’s “homeroom” teacher was Herbert Winslow Smith, who had joined the English department in 1917 after receiving his master’s degree from Harvard. A man of remarkable intellect, Smith was well on his way to obtaining a doctorate when he was recruited to teach. He was so taken by his initial experience at Ethical Culture that he never went back to Cambridge. Smith would spend his entire career at Ethical Culture, eventually becoming the school’s principal. Barrel-chested and athletic, he was a warm and gentle teacher who somehow always managed to find out what each student was most curious about and then relate it to the topic at hand. After his lectures, students invariably could be found lingering around his desk, trying to squeeze a little more conversation out of their teacher. Though Robert’s first passion was clearly science, Smith stoked his literary interests; he thought Robert already had a “magnificent prose style.” Once, after Robert wrote an entertaining essay on oxygen, Smith suggested, “I think your vocation is to be a science writer.” Smith would become Robert’s friend and counselor. He was “very, very kind to his students,” Francis Fergusson recalled. “He took on Robert and me and various other people . . . saw them through their troubles and advised them what to do next.”

Robert had his breakthrough year as a junior, when he took a course in physics with Augustus Klock. “He was marvelous,” Robert said. “I got so excited after the first year, I arranged to spend the summer working with him setting up equipment for the following year, when I would then take chemistry. We must have spent five days a week together; once in a while we would even go off on a mineral hunting junket as a reward.” He began to experiment with electrolytes and conduction. “I loved chemistry so deeply. . . . Compared to physics, it starts right in the heart of things and very soon you have that connection between what you see and a really very sweeping set of ideas which could exist in physics but is very much less likely to be accessible.” Robert would always feel indebted to Klock for having set him on the road to science. “He loved the bumpy contingent nature of the way in which you actually find out something, and he loved the excitement that he could stir up in young people.”

Even fifty years later, Jane Didisheim’s memories of Robert were particularly vivid. “He blushed extraordinarily easily,” she recalled. He seemed “very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and superior. As far as studies were concerned he was good in everything. . . .”

The sheltered atmosphere of the Ethical Culture School was ideal for an unusually awkward adolescent polymath. It allowed Robert to shine when and where he wished—and protected him from those social challenges with which he was not yet prepared to cope. And yet, this same cocoon of security offered by the school may help to explain his prolonged adolescence. He was permitted to remain a child, and allowed to grow gradually out of his immaturity rather than being wrenched abruptly from it. At sixteen or seventeen he had only one real friend, Francis Fergusson, a scholarship boy from New Mexico who became his classmate during their senior year. By the time Fergusson met him in the fall of 1919, Robert was just coasting. “He was just sort of playing around and trying to find something to keep himself occupied,” recalled Fergusson. In addition to courses in history, English literature, math and physics, Robert enrolled in Greek, Latin, French and German. “He still took straight A’s.” He would graduate as the valedictorian of his class.

Besides hiking and rock-collecting, Robert’s chief physical activity was sailing. By all accounts, he was an audacious, expert sailor who pushed his boat to the edge. As a young boy he had honed his skills on several smaller boats, but when he turned sixteen, Julius bought him a twenty-eight-foot sloop. He christened it the
Trimethy,
a name derived from the chemical compound trimethylene dioxide. He loved sailing in summer storms, racing the boat against the tides through the inlet at Fire Island and straight out into the Atlantic. With his younger brother, Frank, hunkered down in the cockpit, Robert would stand with the tiller between his legs, screaming gleefully into the wind as he tacked the boat back into Long Island’s Great South Bay. His parents could not reconcile such impetuous behavior with the Robert they knew as a shy introvert. Invariably, Ella found herself standing at the window of their Bay Shore home, searching for a trace of the
Trimethy
on the skyline. More than once, Julius felt compelled to chase the
Trimethy
back to port in a motor launch, reprimanding Robert for the risks he was taking with his own and others’ lives. “Roberty, Roberty . . . ,” he would say, shaking his head. Robert, however, was unabashed; indeed, he never failed to display absolute confidence in his mastery over wind and sea. He knew the full measure of his skill and saw no reason to cheat himself of what was clearly an emotionally liberating experience. Still, if not foolhardy, his behavior in stormy seas struck some friends as an example of Robert’s deeply ingrained arrogance, or perhaps a not very surprising extension of his inner resiliency. He had an irresistible urge to flirt with danger.

Fergusson would never forget the first time he sailed with Robert. The two friends had both just turned seventeen. “It was a blowy day in spring— very chilly—and the wind made little waves all over the bay,” Fergusson said, “and there was rain in the air. It was a little bit scary to me, because I didn’t know whether he could do it or not. But he did; he was already a pretty skilled sailor. His mother was watching from the upstairs window and probably having palpitations of all kinds. But he had induced her to let him go. She worried, but she put up with it. We got thoroughly soaked, of course, with the wind and the waves. But I was very impressed.”

ROBERT GRADUATED FROM THE Ethical Culture School in the spring of 1921, and that summer Julius and Ella took their sons for the summer to Germany. Robert struck out on his own for a few weeks on a prospecting field trip among some of the old mines near Joachimsthal, northeast of Berlin. (Ironically, just two decades later, the Germans would be mining uranium from this site for their atomic bomb project.) After camping out in rugged conditions, he returned with a suitcase full of rock specimens and what turned out to be a near-fatal case of trench dysentery. Shipped home on a stretcher, he was ill and bedridden long enough to force the postponement of his enrollment at Harvard that autumn. Instead, his parents compelled him to remain at home, recuperating from the dysentery and a subsequent case of colitis. The latter would plague him for the rest of his days, aggravated by a stubborn appetite for spicy foods. He was not a good patient. It was a long winter, cooped up in the New York apartment, and at times he acted boorishly, locking himself in his room and brushing aside his mother’s ministrations.

By the spring of 1922, Julius thought the boy well enough to get him out of the house. To this end, he urged Herbert Smith to take Robert with him that summer on a trip to the Southwest. The Ethical Culture School teacher had made a similar trip with another student the previous summer, and Julius thought a Western adventure would help to harden his son. Smith agreed; he was taken aback, however, when Robert approached him in private shortly before their departure with a strange proposition: Would Smith agree to let him travel under the name “Smith” as his younger brother? Smith rejected the suggestion out of hand, and couldn’t help but think that some part of Robert was uncomfortable with being identifiably Jewish. Robert’s classmate Francis Fergusson later speculated, similarly, that his friend may have felt self-conscious about “his Jewishness and his wealth, and his eastern connections, and [that] his going to New Mexico was partly to escape from that.” Another classmate, Jeanette Mirsky, also thought Robert felt some unease about his Jewishness. “We all did,” said Mirsky. Yet just a few years later, at Harvard, Robert seemed much more relaxed about his Jewish heritage, telling a friend of Scotch-Irish ancestry, “Well, neither one of us came over on the
Mayflower.
”