Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (42 page)

^fn27
The advantage of publishing a short paper as a letter to the editor is that it can appear in print within a very brief time – Oppenheimer’s letter was dated 14 February 1930 and appeared in the 1 March issue of the journal. The disadvantage is that it has less authority than if it has gone through the normal peer-review procedure.

^fn28
A full understanding of beta decay was not arrived at until a few years after Pauli’s postulation of the neutrino, and therefore many years after Rutherford’s original identification and naming of it. What Rutherford knew was that there was a form of radioactive decay different from alpha decay, in which the radiation consisted not of positively charged helium nuclei, but of much smaller, negatively charged particles, which he correctly identified as electrons. What was subsequently discovered is that these electrons are being emitted from neutrons that are decaying into protons.

^fn29
To understand the problem, it might help to give an example. A nucleus of Cobalt (with atomic number 27) undergoes beta decay and so gains a proton, thus transforming into Nickel (atomic number 28). In this process, an electron is emitted. What puzzled Pauli and other physicists at this time was that, when this happens, the figures often do not add up: the total energy of (in this case) the Nickel nucleus plus the electron sometimes does, and sometimes does not, equal the energy of the original Cobalt nucleus, depending on the energy of the electron, which varies along a continuous spectrum.

^fn30
Pauli was at the time going through an emotionally draining divorce from his first wife.

^fn31
The notion of an isotope originated in 1912, when the chemist Frederick Soddy coined the word to describe two or more atoms that occupy the same place in the periodic table, but have different radioactive properties. After the discovery of the neutron in 1932, it was realised that two isotopes of the same element differ with respect to the number of neutrons in their nuclei.

^fn32
C.P. Snow reports that, during this period, a ‘dialogue passed into Cavendish tradition: “Tired, Chadwick?” “Not too tired to work.”’

^fn33
When an alpha particle hits a screen made of a suitable substance (zinc sulphide was the most commonly used), it emits a tiny flash of light known as a ‘scintillation’. The experiments of Rutherford and his team at the Cavendish – and, indeed, the work pursued at most advanced physics laboratories – made use of this fact to detect the presence of alpha particles.

^fn34
I am rather puzzled as to what Oppenheimer might mean by this. The Yaqui are a Native American tribe, whose original lands were in what is now Mexico, California and Arizona. Presumably, further up the hill on which Oppenheimer’s house stood, there lived a group of Yaqui people.

^fn35
It would not be until the summer of the following year that Oppenheimer became resigned to the word ‘positron’, which he regarded as a barbaric mixture of Latin (
posi
-) and Greek (-
tron
).

^fn36
The great German mathematician Hermann Weyl had been at the institute in Princeton since 1933.

UNTIL THE SUMMER
of 1935, the longest, most intimate, most revealing letters that Oppenheimer wrote were to his brother, Frank. In that summer, however, the series of letters came to a temporary end when Frank moved to California. He did so to begin a PhD at Caltech with Charles Lauritsen (‘Charlie’ to both Oppenheimers and to most people who knew him). Frank was then twenty-three years old. Since graduating from Johns Hopkins two years earlier, he had spent about eighteen months at the Cavendish in Cambridge and another six months at the University of Florence. He had also spent some time in Germany. Though he always felt himself to be under the shadow of his accomplished older brother, there was one respect in which, by the time he returned to the US, he had succeeded where Robert had failed: he had mastered the skills needed for laboratory work and to become an experimental physicist.

Another way in which Frank differed from his brother was that, throughout his school and university education, he had taken an active interest in politics. From the first, his political sympathies were with the downtrodden. ‘I remember once,’ he laughingly said in an interview, recalling an incident during his school days, ‘I went with some friends to hear a concert at Carnegie Hall that didn’t have a conductor. It was a kind of “down with the bosses” movement.’ In the 1928 presidential election, Frank, while still at school, had taken part in the campaign to elect the Democratic Party candidate, Al Smith, who famously aroused the fierce and frightening antagonism of the Ku Klux Klan, both for his liberal politics and for being a Roman Catholic. The campaign was unsuccessful – Smith was beaten by Herbert Hoover – but it provided a focus for liberal politics in the US that paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory in 1932 and the ‘New Deal’ that followed.

In the light of what was to occur in the 1950s, one interesting aspect of the 1928 Smith campaign was the candidate’s use of the word
‘un-American’ to characterise not those on the left of American politics, but those on the right. When he arrived in Oklahoma City to be greeted by the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses, Smith said: ‘To inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign. Nothing could be so out of line with the spirit of America. Nothing could be so foreign to the teachings of Jefferson. Nothing could be so contradictory of our whole history.’ He went on: ‘The best way to kill anything un-American is to drag it out into the open, because anything un-American cannot live in the sunlight.’

Frank Oppenheimer’s approach to politics is perfectly captured in these quotations. As he drifted further and further to the left, he did so quite openly, feeling that he had nothing to hide, and feeling also that not only was there nothing unpatriotic about left-wing politics, but indeed such politics were perfectly in keeping with the spirit and the history of America. If you were brought up, as Frank and Robert Oppenheimer were, to believe that America was the embodiment of the tolerance, freedom and egalitarianism that the German Jews of the nineteenth century had left their homeland to find, then it would have been – and was – utterly alien to think of its spirit as being represented and defended by such people as the Ku Klux Klan or, later, the paranoid anti-communists of the McCarthy period. It was, as Al Smith had said, the bigotry of those people, not the targets of their bigotry, that was ‘un-American’.

‘When I went to Hopkins,’ Frank continued in the interview quoted above, ‘I knew quite a few people . . . I didn’t know whether they were party members or not, but they were interested in left-wing politics, and I learned about it.’ In England, he was ‘a little more on the fringe’ of radical politics, but in Italy ‘there were people there of varying degrees of leftness’, including Patrick Blackett’s co-worker on the discovery of the the positron, Giuseppe Occhialini, who by then had returned to the University of Florence and was, according to Frank, ‘quite left’. Mussolini’s Italy, which had been a Fascist state for many years, had, during Frank’s time there, just embarked on its aggressive foreign policy: ‘It was the year before the Abyssinian War. There was a brigade of soldiers just below the lab there, who were always singing and cheering.’

The singing and cheering of the Italian soldiers, though a constant reminder of the nature of the military dictatorship that ruled the country, was not felt by Frank to be especially menacing. ‘In Italy,’ Frank remembers, ‘the soldiers didn’t seem especially aggressive. I never saw any of them marching. The policemen weren’t any different, and were probably gentler, than New York policemen. The towns seemed very relaxed to me.’ In Germany the previous year, however: ‘I had seen people marching down the streets, and really sort of lots of this behaviour in the bars,
and the whole society seemed corrupt. And then I had some relatives there who could tell me some of the terrible things.’ Having mixed with left-wing people at Johns Hopkins, the Cavendish and the University of Florence, and having seen for himself the viciousness of the Nazi regime in Germany, it was only natural that, when he went to California, Frank should choose as his friends people concerned about the threat of fascism and interested in improving the lot of the poor and the dispossessed.

In fact, Frank already knew a number of such people, namely some of his brother’s students, among whom were a few who would later achieve fame because their politics offended the American right. One of these was the unassuming Wendell Furry, who had left for Harvard in 1934. At Harvard, Furry joined the Communist Party and therefore became a target for McCarthyites in the 1950s. Furry won the admiration of many by refusing either to take cover behind the Fifth Amendment or to name any of his comrades in the Party. Likewise, Harvard won admiration for refusing to sack Furry. The case left deep scars, however. In a book called
Moscow Stories
, published in 2006, the writer and expert in Russian affairs Loren R. Graham describes how, coming himself from Farmersburg, the same small town in Indiana in which Furry had grown up, he became fascinated by Furry’s story. As a small child, he had been told by his schoolteacher that he was the cleverest boy she had ever taught, with one exception: Wendell Furry. And yet, she said, she was ashamed of Furry and hoped that Graham did not end up like him. ‘How
did
he end up?’ Graham asked. ‘He is a communist,’ came the reply. That was in 1941. Many years later, in 1974, Graham met Furry and they swapped stories about Farmersburg. A short while after that meeting Furry retired and a few years later he died. ‘In the last months of his life’, according to Graham:

Melba Phillips came from a remarkably similar background to Wendell Furry. She, too, was raised by a Methodist family in a small town in a farming community in Indiana, in a place called Hazleton, just fifty or sixty miles south of Farmersburg. And she, too, became politically radical, though it is not clear whether she ever became a member of the Communist Party. When, in the McCarthy period, she was summoned to answer questions
about her political activities in the 1930s, she refused to say whether or not she had ever been a member of the Party, pleading the Fifth Amendment. For this, she was sacked from her position at Brooklyn College.

There is no documentary record of Frank Oppenheimer ever meeting Wendell Furry, but, given how much time Furry spent with Robert Oppenheimer between 1932 and 1934, it would be surprising if they had never come across each other. Certainly, Frank knew Melba Phillips very well indeed, and the two of them became close friends and remained so until Frank’s death. Her memories of Frank are particularly warm. She met him first, she remembers, at Perro Caliente in the summer of 1932, ‘when I stopped for a few days on the way back to school from a visit to my family in Indiana’.

‘We were not political in any overt way,’ Melba said of herself, Oppenheimer and her fellow students, but, her biographer writes, ‘the grim news from Germany in 1933–4, and the labor unrest that hit California during the Great Depression, motivated them to take an active interest in world affairs’.

As we have seen, in the year 1933–4 there is little in Oppenheimer’s correspondence or anywhere else to indicate the ‘active interest’ in politics described here, but, coinciding with the arrival of Robert Serber and his wife, Charlotte, in the summer of 1934, there is at least
some
indication of such interest. In Serber’s autobiography there is an intriguing account of a rally in support of the longshoremen’s strike in 1934, which Oppenheimer was invited to attend. He, in turn, invited Serber, Charlotte and Melba Phillips to come along.As Serber remembers it: ‘We were sitting up high in a balcony, and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”’

This makes it sound as if the rally they attended was being held to decide upon strike action, but this cannot be right, since the strike (which was a major event in the history of both unionisation and the Communist Party in America) had begun in May 1934, before Serber met Oppenheimer. More likely, it was one of the meetings held in July 1934, when the longshoremen’s strike escalated into a general strike, after two strikers had been killed by police firing into a crowd of pickets. The general strike ended soon afterwards, but the result was an increase in the power of the longshoremen’s union and an improvement in their terms of employment – victories that the Communist Party would claim for itself.

At the time of Frank’s arrival at Caltech, Robert Serber had been a National Research Fellow at Berkeley for a year and had become the person closest to Oppenheimer, both personally and scientifically, and would remain so until his departure in 1938. Though Serber was, like Oppenheimer himself, more interested in physics than politics, he had grown up in an environment of which political engagement was an accepted and expected part. He and his wife both came from fairly well-off Jewish families in Philadelphia. His father was a lawyer active in the local Democratic Party, while Charlotte’s father, a doctor, was a well-known leftist radical. In the 1940s, both Robert and Charlotte Serber would receive close attention from the FBI, though their agents could never gather enough incriminating evidence against Robert to justify taking any action against him. This almost certainly means that Robert Serber never joined the Communist Party. When the question was put directly to him in the 1940s, however, Oppenheimer expressed the belief that Charlotte probably was a member.