Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (8 page)

Another classmate remembers him as ‘rather gauche’, adding ‘he didn’t really know how to get along with other children’. Perhaps thinking that he was playing to his strengths, Oppenheimer – who could not become popular through playing sport or by being mature or streetwise – struck many of his fellow pupils as a little too anxious to demonstrate his intellectual precocity. As one of them put it, he had ‘a great need to declare his pre-eminence’. ‘Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,’ he once remarked to a girl in his class. His maths teacher recalled that he was difficult to teach because he was ‘so far ahead of everybody and very restless’, a view echoed by his other teachers. His grades, however, particularly in his early school years, do not confirm this impression of unreachable genius. They certainly were not bad, but they were mostly A− and B+, rather than the consistent A+ that one might have expected.

Outside of school, his interests were scholarly, solitary and characteristic of a much older boy. ‘When I was ten or twelve years old,’ he recalled as an adult, ‘minerals, writing poems and reading, and building with blocks still – architecture – were the three themes that I did.’
^fn3
What he meant by the single word ‘minerals’ was the deep interest he had
developed in mineralogy following his grandfather’s gift of a collection of rocks. On walks around New York’s Central Park, on summer holidays in Long Island and on family visits to Germany, Oppenheimer would collect rock samples, which he would then identify and display in Riverside Drive. In pursuit of this hobby, he joined the New York Mineralogical Club, its other members only realising how young he was after they had invited him to present a paper and found themselves listening to a twelve-year-old boy.

At the end of Oppenheimer’s third year of school, when he was ten years old, the First World War broke out. It would be another three years before the United States entered the war, but its effects were felt in America, in New York and among the Oppenheimer family long before that. For Rothfeld, Stern & Co. the war presented an opportunity to make a fortune supplying cloak linings for military uniforms, and, as a result, the Oppenheimers were able to buy a holiday home on Long Island. This was not a small summer house, but a mansion of some twenty-five rooms located in Bay Shore (which Oppenheimer always wrote as ‘Bayshore’), then fashionable and upmarket. To explore the Great South Bay during their holiday in this house Julius bought a forty-foot sailing yacht, the
Lorelei
, and, a few years later, a twenty-seven-foot sloop for Robert.

Where the war had a less welcome impact on the Oppenheimers, as on the entire German Jewish community in New York, including the Ethical Culture Society, was in widening the publicly perceived gap between being German and being American – providing Julius and others with yet more reasons to lose all traces of their accents and all vestiges of their ethnic origins. For Felix Adler, the war was something of a disaster. His first response to it was to deliver, in October 1914, an address called ‘The World Crisis and its Meaning’, an expanded version of which was published the following year. ‘Many of our fellow-citizens of German birth,’ Adler declared, ‘aside from the profound anxiety descendants of all the nationalities now at war naturally feel for friends at the front, are troubled with a new misgiving as to their own place in the American nation.’ The reason for this anxiety was plain: ‘Public opinion in the United States is decisively on the side of the Allies and this practically means on the side of England.’ But, Adler insisted, America is
not
English; it represents, as he had been saying for thirty years, a New Ideal. ‘The German ideal,’ he wrote, ‘roughly speaking, is that of efficiency.’ ‘The national ideal of the English,’ on the other hand, ‘may be described as that of
noblesse oblige
.’ In contrast to both these was the American ideal, which ‘is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man’. The task facing adherents of Ethical Culture, Adler told his audience, was to keep alive during the strife the
American
ideal, which, properly understood, was not allied to
either
side in the conflict.

As for the
cause
of the war, Adler offered a surprising analysis. Militarism – identified by many at the time as the cause – was, Adler said, ‘only a symptom’: ‘If we wish to put the blame rightly, or, setting aside the question of blame, if we wish to place the proximate cause rightly, let us place it on the shoulders of science.’ ‘The time will come,’ Adler announced, ‘when that scientist [that is, one who puts his work to use for war] 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.’

Adler’s address was widely perceived to be a plea for neutrality, and, in the atmosphere of the time, being neutral was regarded as being almost as bad as – indeed, barely distinguishable from – being pro-German. The year after Adler’s speech, the
New York Times
hit out at Adler for his ‘high opinion of the morality of the German people’. In the increasingly fervent anti-German atmosphere that was spreading throughout the United States (‘Anything German, from symphony to sauerkraut, was suspect,’ as Howard B. Radest puts it), it took courage to express any opinion other than full-blooded support for the Allies. Certainly no one in the Ethical Culture movement, despite their German heritage, was prepared to be openly in support of the Germans during the war. Some prominent members, however, including John Elliott and David Muzzey, the associate leader of the New York Society, were prepared to publicly support the pacifist case, which put them at odds with Adler himself, whose pro-American position compelled him, after the US entered the war in April 1917, to declare his support for the war. From November 1917 onwards, the Ethical Culture meeting house followed most other public buildings in flying the US flag. Most of the Ethical Culture leaders who had previously been pacifist followed Adler in his support for the war, but John Elliott continued to pursue a pacifist line, devoting himself (even at the risk of being thrown out of the Society) to defending the rights of conscientious objectors. In this, Elliott was radically, and increasingly, out of step with Adler, who, in his Easter Sunday sermon of 1917, went so far as to argue that resistance to the war was
treason
.

In the midst of this potentially ruinous split in the Ethical Culture movement, Oppenheimer, now thirteen years old, entered the high-school part of the Ethical Culture School. The school journal,
Inklings
, had by this time nailed its mast firmly to Adler’s colours and become belligerently pro-war. Encouraging students to do whatever they could for the war effort – joining the Auxiliary Red Cross, sewing bandages, and so on –
Inklings
declared it to be ‘the duty of every high school chap to put his shoulder down and buck up for his country’: ‘All of our brave plans and hopes for the future have to be cast aside to give place to the one predominant purpose of the entire nation . . . We are in the fight and we have got to win!’

In its issue of March 1918, the journal expressed its solidarity with those who regarded political dissent as treachery. ‘In discussing the war,’ its editors declared, ‘we must think of rights which are greater than the individual’s right to expression of personal views . . . one thing we do not want is opposition to the government.’ Three months later, this attack on government critics was renewed: ‘There is no room for dissenters and joy-killers. There is no room for those who complain of the government, of the suffering of the soldiers, of no results, of hard times, etc.’

It is doubtful that Oppenheimer shared these sentiments. His father was such an admirer of Adler that it is difficult to imagine him doing anything but following Adler’s position at every stage; but there are signs that, during his high-school years, Oppenheimer began to distance himself, both from his father and from the Ethical Culture movement. In a satirical poem that he wrote for his father’s birthday he included the slightly mocking line, ‘he swallowed Adler whole like morality compressed’, and in his last year at the Ethical Culture School (1920–1) he wrote a poem for his English teacher which might naturally be read as an indictment of the line taken by Adler and
Inklings
during the war.

The poem is untitled, but an apt name for it might be ‘The Damning Lie’. In its entirety, it reads:

The ‘damning lie’ of which the poem speaks is the insistence that it was the duty of those soldiers whose ‘unnumbered crosses’ lie on Flanders’
fields to regard the soldiers on the other side as their ‘foe’, to hate them and kill them, even at the expense of their own lives. Once this is seen to be not just untrue, but a lie, the poem seems to suggest, then the faith that had previously compelled its acceptance has to be rejected. The most obvious interpretation of the image of the sinking sun that occurs both at the beginning and at the end of the poem is that it is a metaphor for death – not only the deaths of the buried soldiers, but also of the faith that had guided them to their graves. This would include their faith in God, but also their faith in all those people and institutions that had perpetuated the ‘damning lie’: the priests, the governments – and the leaders of the Ethical Culture Society, together with the teachers and pupils at the Ethical Culture School.

The poem perhaps provides a clue as to what lies behind Rabi’s remark about Oppenheimer’s relationship with his school and the Ethical Culture movement: ‘From conversations with him I have the impression that his own regard for the school was not affectionate. Too great a dose of Ethical Culture can often sour the budding intellectual who would prefer a more profound approach to human relations and man’s place in the universe.’ As Julius was so closely associated with the Ethical Culture movement, Oppenheimer, in distancing himself from Ethical Culture, was also distancing himself from his father – a process that, perhaps inevitably, was accompanied by feelings of guilt.

If his first year at high school, 1917–18, was the year in which he broke free, to some extent, of the influence of Ethical Culture and his father, it was also the year in which Oppenheimer acquired a new father-figure, and possibly someone who could help him find the ‘more profound approach to human relations’ that Rabi mentions him needing. That man was Herbert Winslow Smith, a Harvard graduate who came to the Ethical Culture School in 1917 to teach English. He was at that time still intending to finish a PhD at Harvard, but enjoyed teaching at the Ethical Culture School so much that he stayed there, his PhD unfinished and forgotten, for the rest of his life.

Clearly in his element at the Ethical Culture School, Smith became known as a teacher willing and able to form close relationships with his pupils. He formed an especially deep interest in Oppenheimer, his later recollections of whom reveal a predilection for psychoanalysis and an assumption that he understood the young Oppenheimer as well as, if not better than, Oppenheimer’s own family. One of Smith’s repeated themes is the uneasiness of Oppenheimer’s relationship with his father. Julius Oppenheimer, Smith said, had a touch of ‘business vulgarity which acutely embarrassed Robert, although he would never mention it’. Many of Robert’s problems, according to Smith, were due to a ‘pronounced oedipal attitude’ towards his father.

It was in the summer after Smith’s first year at the school – the summer
of 1918, as the First World War was coming to an end – that Oppenheimer, then fourteen years old, underwent an experience that Smith was convinced was one of the most important of his life, and which was for Smith the paradigm example of the ways in which Oppenheimer blamed his father for his suffering.

The incident took place during Oppenheimer’s stay at Camp Koenig, a boys’ summer camp on Grindstone Island in Lake Ontario. The camp was run by Dr Otto Koenig, the principal of the Sachs Collegiate Institute, a Jewish boys’ school in the Upper West Side of New York City. Koenig’s son, Fred, later professor of chemistry at Stanford University, became Oppenheimer’s only friend at the camp. ‘I often felt,’ Fred Koenig said years later, ‘that what happened to Robert in camp that summer could easily account for much of his behaviour – his actions – that people found so baffling.’

At the camp Oppenheimer became the victim of increasingly vicious bullying. The other boys called him ‘Cutie’ and mocked him for writing to his parents every day and for reading poetry. In one of his letters home Oppenheimer, perhaps trying to give the entirely false impression that he was mixing well with the other boys, told his parents that he was glad to be at the camp because he was learning a great deal from his fellow campers, especially about sex. This brought his enraged parents hurriedly to the camp, where his father demanded that the camp director do something about the spread of smut among the boys. When the camp director duly announced that disciplinary measures would be taken against those caught telling dirty stories, the boys sought their revenge on the telltale who had betrayed them. One evening, while taking a walk, Oppenheimer was captured and dragged to the icehouse, where he was stripped, his buttocks and genitals were painted green and he was tied up and left alone. As Fred Koenig later put it: ‘They, as it were, crucified him.’